Mortification

In order to please God and to show Him her love, the Servant of God took to mortification and penance. At the age of seven, she renounced what she liked to eat. At about the age of thirteen, she felt the need for physical mortification: “I felt the ardent desire to practice physical penitence. I began to kneel down on something hard in order to pray. With tears in the eyes I said: ‘Oh my Jesus, grant me the grace not to spend even one hour a day without loving You!’.”She mortified herself when working in the fields, thinking of the drops of blood of her Savior and praying: “You will give me now what I’m asking of You, won’t You my Jesus? You will let me know what I have to do to make You happy and not sad.” It happens also that she slept on something hard. In this practice of mortification, she was completely obedient to her confessor. Her mortification was also interior: “In my mind I was searching for a small mortification I could do while I was working or being on the way. I did this to be given the grace to love God more and more.” She taught her Daughters the practice of exterior and interior mortification and she was continually an example to them.

The Servant of God had the desire for humiliations, contradictions, contempt. When she thought about entering a religious order “it is in order to be the last one of all”. “Oh my God, let me suffer more, I want to suffer with You.” Throughout her life she had to endure contempt and contradictions of all kinds, at first because of her ecstatic state, then because of her works, which were regarded as crazy and not going to succeed. She endured everything without complaining. “See, my daughter, if a soul behaves like this, I open my heart for her. I let her know the love I feel for her. I show her that my relations with her are full of love and how dangerous it would have been if I had given her what she expected of me and how useful were those trials and contradictions for her. I let her experience my maternal concern and protection. I let her know herself.”
Father Amhard CSsR could say about her: “She had a great desire for humiliations and the cross.” Her instructions to her Daughters were also always marked by this: “Accept, my children, those humiliations wholeheartedly according to the example of the apostles, who were glad to be worthy to suffer contempt and insults in the name of Jesus Christ.”