Amália de Jesus Flagelado

Amália de Jesus Flagelado, born Amália Aguilera y Aguilera in 1901 in Spain, was a Roman Catholic religious sister and mystic whose name is tied to the twentieth-century devotion of Our Lady of Tears at Campinas in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. As a child she emigrated with her family from Spain to Brazil and settled in the Campinas region. Precise details of her parents, siblings, and exact Spanish birthplace are poorly documented in reliable historical literature and are reported inconsistently in popular accounts, so they cannot be stated with confidence. Raised in a Catholic household, she entered religious life in Campinas after the foundation, in 1928, of the Congregation of the Missionaries of Jesus Crucified (Congregação das Missionárias de Jesus Crucificado) by Bishop Francisco de Campos Barreto of Campinas and Mother Maria Villac. She received the religious name Amália de Jesus Flagelado, a title that expressed a spirituality focused on the Passion of Christ, especially the Flagellation.

While living in the congregation’s house in Campinas, Sister Amália reported a sequence of mystical experiences at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. According to the accounts later circulated with local diocesan approval, Jesus Christ appeared to her on 8 November 1929 and asked that a devotion to his Holy Wounds be spread, including a chaplet and a medal. On 8 March 1930 she reported an apparition of the Virgin Mary, who presented herself as Nossa Senhora das Lágrimas (Our Lady of Tears). In that account Mary was described as weeping and as giving a chaplet—thereafter called the Chaplet of the Tears of Mary—together with associated promises for those who would honor her tears in a spirit of reparation. Sister Amália was also said by her community to have lived a hidden life of interior trial offered in union with the Passion; claims of extraordinary phenomena beyond the reported visions belong to the congregation’s tradition rather than to independently verified public record.

Bishop Francisco de Campos Barreto examined the reported events and in 1930–1931 granted approval for public use of the prayers, the chaplet, and the medal of Our Lady of Tears, issuing an imprimatur and encouraging the devotion within the Diocese of Campinas. The devotion spread in Brazil and among some Catholic groups elsewhere, remaining essentially a local and popular devotion. It did not receive a definitive judgment from the Holy See comparable to the great recognized Marian shrines, and Sister Amália herself did not become an international public figure. She continued the ordinary round of community life in Campinas, combining prayer with the duties of her congregation.

She died in Campinas on 18 April 1977. She has not been beatified or canonized, has no feast day on the general Roman calendar, and has no officially assigned patronages. Her historical importance rests on the diocesan-level promotion of the Campinas devotion to Our Lady of Tears and on the record of a relatively obscure Spanish-born Brazilian sister whose reported visions were received with limited local approbation. Much of what is written about her interior life depends on literature produced by her congregation and by promoters of that devotion; independent archival biography remains thin.