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MARIAM BAOUARDY ..

 

María de Jesús Crucificado, is a Catholic saint who was a nun of the Order of Discalced Carmelites

 

 On the death of their parents, according to the Eastern custom, the children were distributed among their relatives: Pablo was adopted by a maternal aunt who lived in a neighboring town and Mariam was adopted by a paternal uncle, from a well-off situation, who after some years will move to Alexandria in Egypt. The two little brothers will never see each other again.

 

 We know almost nothing about Mariam’s childhood, only a few memories that she herself will tell us later, of which she always reveals a particular heavenly protection.

 

The most delicate and intimate episode was certainly the one that happens once, it is a small domestic incident. The little girl had been given some birds in a cage, she wanted to take care of them but she was not able to do so and pretending to bathe them as babies are bathed, all the birds died.

As she buried them, she felt her heart shake with regret, but an inner voice tells her: “Look, everything happens! But if you want to give me your heart, I will always remain with you ”.

 

 She was still very small, but she will never forget that voice.

 

On another occasion, a venerable pilgrim arrived and, as usual, stayed at the house, and behold, when he meets the girl, looking at her full of a strange emotion, he implores: “Take care of this Girl, I beg you, take care to this Girl! «

 

Many years later, when Mariam will tell this story, she in her infinite humility will explain: “Perhaps this holy man, sensing my sins, would feel concern for the salvation of my soul!

 

In reality, he was growing up like an angel, his greatest desire being to make First Communion. He managed to do it a few years earlier than planned because, by dint of insisting with the priest, she had managed to extract a distracted yes, to which the little girl, almost eight years old, she readily obeys.

When Mariam reached puberty – as usual she was already engaged in marriage to a distant relative, without even knowing it – they told her that the time to marry had come: the groom arrived bringing precious jewels and the family had prepared sumptuous embroidered dresses.

 

    But Mariam could not be at peace because that Voice that she had felt when she was a child («If you want to give me your heart, I will stay with you forever»), reminded her that she had already given her yes and now that she was thirteen she could not pronounce another yes.

The family could not understand it, they thought it was a temporary whim of which the girls are frequently victims, they called the priest and even the Bishop of the Community to explain the obedience he owed to his adoptive parents when dealing with a matter so important.

 

The day her husband showed up for the ceremony, and everyone was waiting for Mariam to come out of her room decked out in precious dresses and jewels, she showed up with her long hair cut off and placed on a tray along with her jewels. gold

Her uncle’s anger was so great that the young woman was sent to the kitchen along with the house slaves, subjecting her to her own humiliation. And the confessor – who did not understand anything about her – went so far as to deny her absolution and to forbid her communion.

 

After three months of suffering, Mariam remembered her brother Pablo hers who was in Palestine and tried to contact him. She had a letter written and in the afternoon, secretly, took it to a Muslim servant whom she had met at the house of her uncle and that she was to leave for Nazareth.

 

The servant knew the adventures and sufferings of the young woman. When she arrived, all busy, the family was about to start dinner, the Muslim’s wife and mother insisted that she stay for dinner, they treated her with courtesy, they asked her to tell them the latest events of her. The man became more and more angry, he said that Christians had no heart, he exhorted the girl to abandon her co-religionists, and even she offered him her own house …

 

Back then, religious hatred was so violent and soon to ignite for nothing. Mariam reacts: “Muslim me? Never! I am a daughter of the Catholic Church and I hope to remain so throughout my life. «

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Her response was a kick from the man that made her fall to the ground; then, blinded with rage, he drew his sword from her and slit her throat. To get rid of the corpse, they wrapped it in a sheet and dumped it on a dark path on the outskirts of town.

It was September 7, 1858.

 

What happened later, we only know from the account made by Mariam many years later, when she was already a cloistered Carmelite holy nun: she said that it seemed to her that she entered Paradise where she had seen the Virgin and the saints and also her parents, and to the Glorious Trinity.

Then, a voice had told him: «Your book has not been finished writing» so he found himself in a grotto where he spent several days a victim of fever, assisted by a young woman, who seemed to be a nun and who was wearing a light blue veil. . She took care of her, fed her and made her sleep for a long time. About four weeks later, this nun had taken her to the Franciscan Church, leaving her there.

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In general, she Mariam she did not claim to have been assisted by the Virgin Mary, she showed only the scar of a length of ten centimeters and one centimeter wide that crossed her neck.

Sixteen years after the fact, a famous atheist doctor who will visit her in France, in Marseille, noting that she was missing some trachea rings, will say: “A God must exist, because no one in the world, without a miracle, could survive after a wound like this ”.

 

Only during an ecstasy that occurred on September 7, 1874, did she hear her exclaim: “Today my Mother was with me. Today I have consecrated my whole life to her … At night they had cut her neck and the next day Maria had me with her «

Mariam’s adoptive family was convinced of the escape of this strange and disobedient daughter and Mariam never looked for her again.

Thus, with barely thirteen years old, she becomes a poor servant, first in Alexandria, then in Jerusalem and then in Beirut. She preferred to choose poor families, and ended up taking care of a sick and destitute family for which she herself had to beg.

 

She did not lack adventures, dangers, humiliations, but she seemed that someone always protected her.

In 1863 she accepted the invitation to enter the novitiate of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, although she had nothing else to offer than her love for God and her availability to perform the humblest works.

 

She gladly volunteered for all the heavy work. «I do this, because I have time,» she said in her poor French, while she struggled to precede her companions in fatigue

 

If they corrected her, she would say: “Sorry, I’m very bad. You pray for me ”. She supervised everyone: the sisters, the superior, the bishops and cardinals. And this will be her personal characteristic forever.

 

Most of the time she spent it in the kitchen or in the laundry room.

………….

But between the stoves and the bleach, ecstasies and visions often followed one another. Between Thursday and Friday, on her hands and on her feet, bloody stigmata appeared that she considered a disease and she hid her wounds with great care, being ashamed of them.

…………….

As in Palestine, she had met the lepers, she believed she had contracted leprosy and she said to her superior: «Mother, do not come near me, otherwise you will contract my disease.» Be calm, my daughter, it is not probable that I will contract it! ”.

 

On Wednesday he asked to be able to extend his work, because he had to make up the time that he would lose «in the two days of illness.» «Mother,» she said to the superior, «would you like to lend me a sister to help me finish the washing, because on Thursday and Friday I will be ill, and would you like to finish now?»

 

But, in 1867 – in the absence of the Mother General who understood her and protected her from her – she was resigned by the Council of the Institute, since everything that happened to her upset the community a lot.

 

They advised her to enter a Carmel, thinking that closing her could better protect her from the curiosity of the world.

She thus arrives at Carmel de Pau, in the Low Pyrenees, being presented by the former novitiate mistress with the forceful statement: «this Arabite is a miracle of obedience.» She takes the name of Sister María de Jesús Crucificado.

 

Hadn’t the Apostle Paul already written, in fact, «that he did not want to know anything other than Jesus and him crucified»? (1 Cor 2,2), and well for Sister Mariam this was a truth that was fulfilled to the letter: “I didn’t know anything else”.

She was twenty-one years old and showed only twelve, because she was so petite. She only knew how to do material work: cooking, washing and caring for the garden were her usual tasks.

Yet the rest was a fabric of wondrous things.

 

Her ecstasies continued, but it was enough for the novitiate mistress to call her «for obedience» and all extraordinary phenomena were immediately interrupted.

 

On the other hand, she was ashamed of herself and was convinced that she was being overcome by her dream and she was distressed by the fact that she could not resist.

  She sometimes confessed that she did not know how to pray.

 

She said to the Superior: “In prayer I have no distractions, but I cannot even finish the shortest prayer. I start the Our Father and I stay in these words  unable to continue. I think: “Oh! My God, You so great, so powerful, You are our Father! You who are in heaven, while we are little worms, dust and ash… and we still have the courage to offend you! Oh my God, have mercy on us … and then I lose myself and fall asleep

 

And he continued: «If afterwards I recite the Hail Mary, and I begin to say to the Virgin:» You are so good, so good, oh my Mother! You the Mother of God and the mother of men! And we poor sinners! … «and then I lose myself and fall asleep: impossible to continue … How should I confess this fact that I cannot continue?»

 

The stigmata always began to bleed again on the day in which the Lord’s passion was commemorated, a sore had also opened on his side, like that of Christ wounded on the Cross. White cloths were placed over the wound to dry the blood, and on the cloth the blood stain took the shape of a heart on which a Cross appeared and sometimes the initials of «Jesus the Savior» could also be read. They are relics that are still preserved.

 

He felt an extraordinary affection for Pope Pius IX whom he called: «My Father», and seemed to know, it is not known how, all the sufferings that afflicted the Church in the various parts of the world, and even sensed some physical dangers that threatened to the people who were around the Pope.

In 1868, after the prayer, he made the Holy Father warn three times that the farmhouse closest to the Vatican had been mined. Nobody wanted to listen to her and on October 23 of that same year, the Serristori farmhouse in Borgo Vecchio exploded in broad daylight.

 

 

     Since then, in Rome they began to listen carefully to the messages that came from the Novice of Pau. Thus, thanks to her, three disasters were avoided, when the following year, during the celebration of the First Vatican Council, he warned that three sacred buildings had been mined.

 

This is how the Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State were interested in her, Mariam will know how to take advantage of this situation to obtain directly from the Holy Father the permission to found two monasteries in Palestine, permits that the Roman Curia had continuously denied.

 

What impressed her was the candor of a girl who ignores malice, to which was added an unlimited generosity, she did not know how to pry when someone needed her and her mortification seemed natural to her.

 

 Instead, internally, she was tested by disintegrating forces. She said of feeling «a little nothing», but God allowed an inner struggle that was constantly sustained in her.

 

The devil tried by all means to convince her of her sin, of her unworthiness, of her infidelity, of her lack of vocation, he drove her towards despair and sometimes forced her to behave so strangely. which she was not used to; in those moments she was reduced to nothingness in the most humiliating sense of the term.

Very hard battles that lasted for months were unleashed in her, struggles during which the devil, causing her atrocious suffering, tried to extract some complaint against God from her mouth, and Mariam stubbornly refuted saying: «Oh Jesus, I am sorry that I do not suffer enough for You.»

 

They were forced to subject her to exorcisms, during which the arabite seemed to be left in the hands of the devil, however he could never overcome it.

 

Once, Satan was heard sarcastically crying out, «Now inform the white body to come canonize her.»

 

During the last and decisive battle, those present could only see Mariam, but they listened to this dialogue, since the demon spoke inside her with a horrible voice and she responded suffering, but with joy and certainty :.

 

«But I see it in creation, I see it in growing trees …»

-No church exists!

 

“But I contemplate his image in each fruit. If I open the fruit, I find the seed. If I open the tabernacle, Jesus is in the Eucharist «

Love does not exist!

 

«But I contemplate the law of love in all animals … I see it in the hen that protects her chicks under her wings.»

 

It was not a game, it was the ancient struggle between God and Satan, which agitated this daughter from the East (as in former times the old Job) and she, without culture, simple as a child, responded with her easiest catechism: that of the nature and the sacraments.

 

Then after the fight, God cradled her like a baby

Then Mariam said: “The thought that I am nothing makes me jump for joy. It is so beautiful to be nothing … Humility is happy to be nothing, it is not tied to anything, it never gets angry, and it is content, happy, it goes everywhere happy, satisfied with everything … Blessed are the little ones ”.

 

They called her spontaneously: «La arabita»

 

Repeatedly I had this vision: I saw a little three-year-old comfortably in the arms of Jesus, a girl similar to her, but at the same time completely different, and Mariam said to Jesus: “How happy this little girl is, you love her so much! » And Jesus replied: «Yes, I love her, look how I have her in my arms, but she doesn’t know it» «She doesn’t know it» – Mariam chided – «Oh if it were me, I assure you that I would know it and be happy.» Later she told Master with a certain envious tone: “That baby didn’t even look at me. She was not looking at anyone outside of Jesus. And Jesus always looked at her! «

 

It was the way in which Jesus explained these words of the Gospel to him:

«If you don’t become like children.»

 

  Among others, she had an intense devotion to the Holy Spirit – something that was very rare in those days. She used a prayer of her own, very beautiful that had flowed from her heart during meditation:

 

«Holy Spirit inspire me

Love of God consummate me

On the right path lead me

Mary Mother of God look at me

With Jesus bless me

 

From all evil, from all illusion, from all danger preserve me. Amen».

And she said the world was wrong because Christians had long forgotten to pray to the Holy Spirit. Even the priests seem to have forgotten

 

On August 21, 1870, together with a small group of eight Mariam sisters, she was sent to India to found the first Carmelite Monastery in Mangalore.

 

Two nuns died during this long journey. Later, in Calcutta, the sister who was appointed to assume the post of Prioress will also die.

 

Of the three that remained, Mariam was still a novice and obtained permission to become a “convert sister” again, that is to say, destined for the hardest and heaviest trades, since she was still unable to follow the choral reading of the breviary.

 

The extraordinary mystical experiences of her continued with the same rhythm and with the same intensity, but they did not prevent her from facing all the tasks consequent to a new foundation. Especially being in such a poor region.

 

In her kitchen, when she was seen with a radiant face, everyone understood that she was, as she used to say, «in the company of the One who had created heaven and earth.»

During the ecstasies she often participated in spirit in everything that happened in the Church: Mariam moved spiritually to the places where persecutions began, where some missionaries were killed (in China for example) and she described them as if she had truly been present; the most painful events found perfect correspondence in the news published by the newspapers later.

 

But misunderstandings came, both the Superior and the Bishop began to doubt this sister that she alternated extraordinary manifestations of grace with moments in which it seemed indeed that the devil possessed her. An intermittence that God allowed of her to purify her completely and to keep her in full consciousness of her nothingness.

 

They accused her of being a visionary, of procuring her own stigmata by wounding herself with a knife, of having a highly exalted oriental imagination, of not being sufficiently transparent with the Superior. The Bishop came to convince her that she was not truly a saint. And that she maybe she just she was a demoniac

 

And it was true that many times the devil returned to torment her, almost to the point of forcing her to deny God while God felt sure of the love of his daughter.

 

Satan even managed to make her commit mistakes, although it is true only outwardly. They were serious offenses against the Rule, peculiar to it that it was a prodigy of obedience.

 

To Mariam, Jesus warned him in advance: “I see you and that’s enough. Don’t say anything, keep quiet «

..

She seemed to him to be submerged in a lake surrounded by snakes, now the Virgin said to him: “I am your Mother. I put you in this water. Do not move. You will not see me, but I will watch over you «

Always, when they hear about these diabolical possessions, believers feel confused because even in our time, the suspicion has spread that it may only be projections and psychological disturbances of those who believe they are possessed.

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But later it is discovered with horror and ever more frequently, that there is no shortage of men in the world who serve the devil with rites of awesome wickedness, and invoke the expansion of his evil and destructive presence.

 

From which we can understand why God sometimes asks his saints to fight against this power that always seeks to sow hatred of God and men. Often these saints must suffer not only the torments caused by the devil, but also the sufferings that come from well-intentioned people who believe they have understood everything beforehand and want to explain everything with their supposed realism.

Well, Mariam is sent back to her Carmel of origin, in France.

 

He rebukes her simple conversational life, made up of so many jobs interrupted by prodigious episodes.

 

She loved nature and felt the charm of it intensely and despite being illiterate, sometimes in ecstasy, she composed beautiful poetry in the oriental way, also inventing strange and sweet melodies to sing them.

 

One very early morning, June 28, 1873, the Prioress found her in ecstasy, sitting on a small bench in front of an open window: “Mother – says Sister Mariam- everyone sleeps and no one thinks God is so kind and so great… no one remembers Him. Look, nature praises Him, the sky, the stars, the trees, the grass, every creature praises the Lord, but man, who knows his benefits and should praise Him, sleeps! Let’s go!

 

Let’s wake up the Universe!

 

Jesus is not known, Jesus is not loved!… ”

 

When she felt the sadness of the distance from God, they heard her pronounce prayers similar to biblical psalms, with the same rhythm and with similar beauty, but they were composed by her, she who could neither read nor write.

…

Here are some verses from a long «penitential psalm» composed of her in a single stroke:

  «Lord, my land is arid and burned,

Bathe me with your frost.

My flesh goes in corruption

And my feet can’t hold me

And my hands can’t move anymore.

My nerves paralyzed

My stuffed bones

nd the marrow of my bones is like polluted smoke .. «

And here is a psalm of contemplation:

What can I compare myself to, Lord?

with the untamed birds in her nest,

if the father and mother do not give them their food

starve

So my soul, Lord

without you

I have no support

I can not live.

What will I compare myself to, Lord?

 

with a tender mother who feeds her child. «

 

Legal experts have affirmed that Mariam seems to become in his poetry «a dazzling juggler of images.»

She had a life that everywhere overflowed extraordinary phenomena, and yet she recommended to everyone: “God save us from such extraordinary states, faith is enough for us; there is no pride in faith. I value so much the grace of being poor and ignorant, because it makes me understand the goodness, the mercy of God, Who, being great, wants to take care of me. It seems to me that if I found myself in an extraordinary state, I would not want to stay in the same city for three months, I would travel the world as long as not to be known ”.

 

To a Bishop who showed his curiosity about extraordinary phenomena, he says:

 

«Monsignor, Jesus entrusts me to tell you: do not stay in the extraordin

 

If they come to tell you: The Holy Virgin appears here or there, or in that place there is an extraordinary soul … don’t go … it’s not worth it …

The Lord says to you: Be rooted in faith, in the Church, in the Gospel, but if you go to consult this and that by relying on the extraordinary, your faith will be weakened.

 

I tell you from the Lord: If you abide by the Faith, the Gospel, He will always be with you and he will never abandon you … «

 

On her side, Mariam never spoke of ecstasy and visions, she spoke of dreams and signs, and accused herself of them as if they were guilt.

 

She fought against his ecstasy, and said simply: «Jesus pulls me on one side and I pull on the other so as not to let myself be overcome by sleep.»

The ecstasies followed one another while washing the dishes or while eating or during recreation, or while washing clothes: «Sometimes it was observed – a sister tells us – how the lingerie that she washed, before our eyes, became very white in her hands»

 

Now we are going to find ourselves before such wonderful facts that they cannot be explained in any way but rather reveal to us the Will of God who wants to amuse himself from our unbelief, from the human pretense that sometimes seeks to tell God what he can do and what he can do. it cannot do, this is possible and that is not.

On June 22, 1873, the sisters miss Mariam’s presence at dinner.

 

 They look for her: She is not in the cell, neither in the cloisters nor in the garden.

They hear her sing a praise of love to God and her voice comes from on high. They look up from her and find her on the top of a gigantic linden tree, about 15 meters high, on the highest branches, so fragile that they would not have been able to support any weight. The prioress orders her out of obedience to descend, and she descends slowly, without hurting herself, with simplicity and great modesty, simply supporting her feet from branch to branch and continuing her song.

 

The ascent is repeated before the eyes of several witnesses, on July 9, 19, 25, 27, 31 and August 3, 1873; These are not fables transmitted from ancient times, they are sworn statements of eyewitnesses, in a time when positivism and scientism prevail.

When the Prioress questioned her, she replied that Jesus was holding out his hands and she should go up. In effect, the phenomenon happened like this: She touched with one hand the little leaves on the edge of the linden, those weak branches that would have yielded to the weight of a little bird, and she quickly rose high, almost sliding over the surface of the tree.

 

Only once, it happened that when the prioress ordered her to go down, she lingered on a branch for a bit, almost disgusted to have to move away – and at that very moment she must have started to descend with her own strength and with considerable fear and caution. , while saying with a sigh: “He’s gone. She lets me go down alone «

 

Sometimes the phenomenon lasted about four hours. When the ecstasy ended she did not remember anything. She woke up at the foot of the linden tree. Sometimes her sandals or her long rosary that she carried around her waist, would remain hanging, entangled in the highest branches (as a visible sign for all of what had happened) and she would then worry about it. not find them. She thought it strange that they made her find a new pair of sandals at the foot of the lime tree, but out of her obedience, all of her sisters were silent, she never knew that these ascents happened when Jesus made her dream.

e seemed to live in a fabled world.

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At the same time and little by little the desire to found a Monastery in Bethlehem began to grow in his heart, exactly in the place where Jesus had been born, and where his parents had asked for the grace of his birth.

The difficulties seemed insurmountable, either because of the doubts of the Patriarch of Jerusalem or because of the determined opposition of the FIDE Propaganda Congregation, however Mariam had precisely the friendship of the Pontiff. In such a way that the nuns’ journey to the Holy Land is directly authorized by Pope Pius IX himself.

In 1875 she Mariam she left for Bethlehem where she arrived accompanied by 8 sisters. She improvises herself as an architect, and master builder in the construction of the monastery: she chooses the site, buys the land, draws up the plans of the building, directs the workers and deals with the suppliers. On the other hand, she was the only one who knew the local language. But she without a doubt, she had an inner Guide that inspired her.

In November 1876 the finished building was inaugurated and monastic life began on the Hill of David.

She confessed in 1876: “I said: I will never see the Lord again, never, never. I can’t resign myself. It is a torment that burns my bones … then I get up at dawn. I begin to do the whitewashing alone (of the entire Monastery). I do not know what I could have done with my body: I ​​would have transported the mountains, I would have removed all the water from the cistern, I would have washed the whole house from top to bottom, without realizing it, so immense was my torment at the thought that I would never see God».

 

 “Here is who has comforted me: we had a guard dog, one day he made a mistake and I scolded him, he only bowed his head a little. Then when I went to the refectory, the dog followed me, I rejected him but he came back, I rejected him again, then he sat by the door and waited for me in such a way that he managed to soften me. So I gave him a piece of bread. I immediately thought of the goodness of God towards the soul that returns insistently to Him as the dog returned to me

“And I felt that it is even more difficult for God not to have compassion on us. My heart melted and the sorrows disappeared. I was like in agony but everything had happened ”.

 

The Novice Mistress of the Bethlehem Monastery, said that sometimes she thought that Mariam was «The victim of humanity», it almost seemed that God asked her to spy on the sins of the whole world following the example of Jesus.

 

 “We cannot get the idea of ​​how much she suffers from it because of certain supernatural impressions that grip her and flood her both at the level of her body and her soul, but especially at the level of her soul, plunging her into a sea of ​​bitterness. She suffers with the pain of every nation, of every individual, and she, even she, is still moved by the pain of the beasts that suffer and that will suffer. In a certain sense we could say that she sympathizes with the land that is too arid or too bathed, the trees and plants that somehow experience the punishment of divine justice «

 

What in certain poets is sensitivity towards crying and the suffering of nature, in her it became a true suffering of expiation that reached the vegetable and animal world and even matter itself.

 

He suffered incredibly when he sensed that wars, famines, havoc were about to break out. Sometimes his suffering was caused by the rejection that many men experience towards God and by the beasts they say.

 

Mariam, at thirty-three years old, always felt more «persecuted by Love», as she used to say. As usual she lived with the heaviest work and began to plan the foundation of another Monastery in Nazareth.

 

She obtained, with new fatigue, the necessary permits and set out on a journey to explore the possibility of building.

 

It was during this journey that she gave another and very strange proof of her particular gifts with which she had been enriched.

It was April 1878. The caravan was advancing towards Nazareth, and had reached the Latroun-Amwas grounds. When the cart stops for the change of horses, the Arabite begins to run quickly, she makes her way through the huts and reaches a clearing where some debris appears. They hear her exclaim: «Here it is, this is the place where my Lord ate with his disciples!» In short, she affirmed that the Emmaus meeting took place in exactly this place. At that time archaeologists had identified elsewhere the people of which the Gospel speaks i

The facts speak: A friend of Mariam’s bought the land, taking her word for it. Almost 50 years later, in 1924-25, Dominican archaeologists began excavations at the place indicated by the Arabite, and discovered the remains of two Byzantine basilicas and a successive crusader basilica forcing scholars to reconsider their conclusions about Emmaus: Mariam had the reason!

 

 But her dream of building a Monastery in Nazareth, she will not be able to realize it herself.

 

She was always more attracted to God. She prayed: «I can’t go on living, I can’t go on living, call me to You»

 

On August 22, she was dragging 2 buckets of water down a steep garden path to feed the masons in charge of maintaining the monastery. She fell three times in a row, the last one on a box of blooming geraniums, and she broke her arm in several places between her wrist and her elbow.

 

The next day she had spread gangrene.

She said, “I am on the way to heaven. I’m about to go to Jesus

He suffered all day. At five o’clock the next morning she was suffocating. The Community is called. They suggested to him as the last prayer: «My Jesus, mercy» He says: «Yes mercy» and he dies kissing the Crucifix.

 

In 1983 she was proclaimed Blessed, the year in which the Jubilee of redemption was celebrated. Here are the words pronounced by John Paul II: “The love of Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified was strong as death. The hardest tests could not extinguish this love. Rather they purified and strengthened it. She has given everything for this love. » And the Pontiff pointed out that the new blessed belonged to the three peoples of the East, who are still fighting in war in the Land of Jesus, and therefore need peace so much.