Alexandrina of Balazar

Blessed Alexandrina Maria da Costa, commonly called Alexandrina of Balazar, was born on 30 March 1904 in the rural parish of Balazar in northern Portugal, in the municipality of Póvoa de Varzim. She was raised in a devout Catholic household of modest means. Her father died while she was still a child, and she grew up with her mother and her sister Deolinda. She received little formal schooling. On Holy Saturday in 1918, when she was fourteen, three men broke into the family home intending to sexually assault her and her sister. To preserve her chastity she jumped from an upper-storey window, falling several metres. She survived, but the injuries to her spine worsened over the following years. By 1925 she was completely paralyzed and remained confined to bed for the rest of her life.

From her sickbed she came to understand her paralysis as a vocation of victimhood. She offered her sufferings in union with Christ for the conversion of sinners and in reparation, especially for offenses against the Eucharist and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She developed a strongly Eucharistic spirituality and received daily Communion. According to the testimony of those who cared for her and to medical observation reported in the cause for her beatification, from March 1942 until her death she took no food or drink other than the Eucharist. She experienced prolonged ecstasies and reported visions of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and various saints. She dictated an autobiographical account and many letters describing her inner life and the messages she believed she received. She became a Salesian Cooperator and was guided by Jesuit and later Salesian spiritual directors. She encouraged frequent Communion, reparation, and consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in a spirituality closely associated with the message of Fátima.

Alexandrina died in Balazar on 13 October 1955, the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fátima. Her reputation for holiness spread in Portugal and among Salesians and others devoted to Eucharistic reparation. Pope John Paul II beatified her on 25 April 2004 in Saint Peter’s Square. She has not been canonized. Her remains rest in the parish church of Balazar, which has become a place of pilgrimage. She is remembered as a lay mystic and “victim soul” whose hidden life of suffering was offered for the Church and for sinners.