Saint Paulina of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus

Saint Paulina of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus, born Amabile Lucia Visintainer, was an Italian immigrant who founded in Brazil the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the first religious community in the south of that country. She is called the first saint of Brazil. The Church commemorates her on July 9, the day of her death.

She was born on December 16, 1865, in Vigolo Vattaro in the province of Trento, which then belonged to Austria, into a poor and devout family. In September 1875 the family, together with many other people from the region, emigrated to the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, where the settlers founded the village of Vigolo in what is now the municipality of Nova Trento. After her First Communion, received at about the age of twelve, Amabile, together with Virginia Rosa Nicolodi, a girl of her own age, taught the catechism to children and visited the sick.

With the consent of their spiritual director the two friends began to live together in a poor house. On July 12, 1890, they took in a woman dying of cancer and cared for her; this day is regarded as the beginning of the congregation. People called their house the “Little Hospital of Saint Virgilius.” On August 25, 1895, the bishop of Curitiba approved the community, and in December of that year Amabile, Virginia, and Teresa Anna Maule took religious vows. Amabile then received the name Paulina of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus.

In 1903 the sisters elected her superior general for life. She then moved to São Paulo, where in the district of Ipiranga she cared for orphans, children of former slaves, and for old and abandoned former slaves. In 1909 the archbishop of São Paulo removed her from office and sent her to work with the sick and the elderly in Bragança Paulista. From then on she could hold no office in the congregation. According to the accounts, she received this decision on her knees and offered of her own accord to serve as an ordinary sister.

In 1918 her successor, Mother Vicência Teodora, with the archbishop’s permission called her back to the motherhouse in the district of Ipiranga. There she spent the rest of her life in obscurity, in prayer and in caring for sick sisters. She confided to her spiritual director that she felt God’s presence so near that it seemed impossible for her to lose it. In 1940, on the congregation’s fiftieth anniversary, she left the sisters a spiritual testament: “Be very humble, trust always and greatly in Divine Providence.”

From 1938 she suffered from severe diabetes. She underwent two operations and amputations, and she spent the last months of her life completely blind. She died in São Paulo on July 9, 1942. Her last words were: “God’s will be done.”

John Paul II beatified her on October 18, 1991, in Florianópolis in the state of Santa Catarina, and canonized her on May 19, 2002, the Solemnity of Pentecost, in Saint Peter’s Square. In his homily at the canonization he recalled that the guiding thread of her life was “being for others,” in the service of the poor and the sick.