“My Father, how grateful I am. I found myself at the height of
misery, but seeing your gift my heart bounded with joy. Oh, I
can at least give a little to my dearest daughters who, poor
children, for the most part, are infirm and weak in stomach
because of long abstinence from nourishing food or drink of
any kind! But how can I help them? I cannot get boarders, and
benefactors there are none, because our relatives have to think
of their own families. My only resource is your charity. You
dry my tears. You console my heart in so many and such great
necessities.”
A Superioress of Tuscany, after having recommended a sick sister whom
she called, “an angel of innocence and of goodness, and on the point of
taking wing for paradise,” and having received some assistance, writes:—
“Jesus watches over His spouses. This morning I received
your offering for the sick sister, which the great charity
of your reverence sent me. I am confused in seeing myself so
benefited without any merit. The sick sister remains alive,
always the victim of her beloved Spouse Jesus. She wastes away
as wax before the fire. She suffers with heroic virtue, and
wishes that your reverence would bless her in order to have
greater strength to suffer more and more in union with Jesus
crucified, whom she has always before her eyes, and continually
kisses. I do not know how to describe her satisfaction at the
charity shown her, nor to tell you her gratitude. I will tell
you only that with all her heart she says to you, ‘May Jesus
reward him together with the benefactors.’ She is young, only
twenty-four years of age, and is in the monastery three years
and three months. The Lord has placed this beautiful flower
(she is called Rose) in His garden, and He will take it at His
pleasure. It seems that we are not worthy to possess it.”
The number of the _Divin Salvatore_, from which the above extracts are
taken, has been selected almost at random from a file of that excellent
journal. The editor very feelingly ends the record as follows:—
“We repeat that these few extracts from letters are given
solely as a sample of numberless other letters of the same
class, which might form many volumes. Ah, how many pages,
besides, would be necessary if we should have to narrate the
sufferings and the secret martyrdoms endured, during, now more
than twenty years, by so many thousands of Italian religious
ladies for the sublime love of that Crucified God, to whom
they were and are consecrated. But such pages are written in
characters of gold only in the book of eternal life, and from
this book it is not given to us to copy. Let it suffice to
know that these admirable creatures so intensely hated by the
world of the sectaries (Freemasons, etc.,) because guilty of
being models of virtue, flowers of purity, doves of innocence,
beings more of heaven than of earth, have won, and still win by
their undaunted perseverance, a most glorious victory over this
world, enemy as it is, of the Name and the Cross of Christ.”