Blessed Alexandrina Maria da Costa

Blessed Alexandrina Maria da Costa, a laywoman from the Portuguese village of Balasar near Braga, was paralyzed from her youth. She spent more than thirty years in bed, offering her suffering for sinners, and for the last thirteen years of her life her only food was the Eucharist. The Church commemorates her on October 13.

She was born on March 30, 1904, in Balasar. Her mother raised her in the Christian faith, together with her older sister Deolinda. At the age of seven she went to live with a carpenter’s family in Póvoa de Varzim so that she could attend school, and there in 1911 she received her First Communion. Afterward she worked in the fields. At the age of twelve she fell seriously ill and nearly died.

On Holy Saturday 1918 three men broke into the room where she was sewing with her sister and a young apprentice. Alexandrina, who was fourteen, jumped out of a window from a height of four meters to defend her purity. The effects of the fall proved irreversible: the paralysis advanced, and from April 14, 1925, she no longer got out of bed, and her sister cared for her. Until 1928 she prayed for healing through the intercession of Mary, promising to become a missionary, and then she accepted suffering as her vocation.

At every Mass she offered herself to the Father for sinners. From 1934, at the request of her spiritual director, the Jesuit Mariano Pinho, she wrote down what, by her own account, Jesus said to her. From 1938 to 1942, every Friday, despite her paralysis, she lived through the Passion of Christ and the successive Stations of the Cross in pain. In 1936, through Father Pinho, she asked the pope to consecrate the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and she renewed this request until 1941. Pius XII made this act on October 31, 1942.

From March 27, 1942, she took no food and lived on the Eucharist alone. In 1943 doctors kept this fast under observation for forty days and nights in a hospital at Foz do Douro near Porto. She also met with distrust: after a negative opinion from a commission of priests, the archbishop of Braga issued a circular letter with prohibitions concerning her case. In 1944 the Salesian Umberto Pasquale became her spiritual director, and she joined the Union of Salesian Cooperators, offering her suffering for the salvation of souls, especially of the young. Many people came to her for counsel.

She died in Balasar on October 13, 1955, the anniversary of the last apparition of Our Lady at Fatima. That day she said that she was happy because she was going to heaven. On her grave, as she had wished, words were written calling on sinners to offend Jesus no more. Since 1978 her body has rested in the parish church of Balasar.

John Paul II recognized her heroic virtues in 1995, and on April 25, 2004, he beatified her in Rome. In his homily he said that she mystically relived the Passion of Christ and offered herself for sinners, and he summed up her example in the words “suffer, love, make reparation.”