p. 195The Sisters of St. Alonso

For fifty years the two sisters of St. Alonso had been leading a hidden life of prayer and penance, alone and sequestered from the world, in their humble home in Segovia. Every morning at three o’clock they arose and, until the hour when the doors of the Church attached to the Jesuit College were opened, gave themselves to mental prayer.¹1They used to read, overnight, by the direction of a Jesuit Father—John de Leon, who afterwards went to the Indies—the Meditations of St. Peter of Alcantara, and Fray Alphonsus de Orozco, an Augustinian Friar in great repute at the time. Marimon, l. vii., § 43. Then they remained in Church, hearing one Mass after another till all were said, and only returned home at eleven o’clock to take a slight meal of meat. After dinner they worked at mending the linen of the College and of the Sacristy of the Jesuits as long as the light allowed them. In the evening they recited the Rosary, slowly and alternately. Then they supped off a crust of bread, a few raisins or some other fruit. Three days in the week they kept a most rigorous fast. It required the orders of their Directors to restrain their love of penance, which they endeavoured to satisfy by almost constant hairshirts, disciplines, and other austerities. They continued to recite the Rosary and other prayers till ten or eleven, when they retired to rest. And when with old age their sight began to fail, the time they had given to work was entirely dedicated to prayer. Thus their whole day was devoted to direct communion with God.

St. Alonso and his holy sisters used to correspond; and a letter exists from the two sisters to their brother, as well as two joint letters from Alonso to his sisters, two from him to Antonia, one to Juliana, and one to “some persecuted servants of God,” very probably addressed by him to both of them.²2Of these, Father Nonell has published four in the “Obras Espir., T. II.” The letters to Juliana, of March 14, 1609, and to Antonia of the same date, are preserved at Montesion. They are, as might be expected, on purely spiritual matters. The sisters spent the entire Sundays and holidays in the Church of the College. They never went, in fact, to any other Church except when, on Maundy Thursday, they had to communicate in their parish Church; and on some rare occasions when they visited a neighbouring church, when the Blessed Sacrament was exposed, or there was some pious festival. At the beginning of their retirement they went to Communion twice a week, later on they approached three or four times, and still later they communicated each day, going to Confession every third day. This frequency, so very unusual in those days, excited some opposition; but their lives were so exceptional that their Directors felt that they deserved exceptional privileges.

In a letter which they wrote to their brother, the two sisters say: “Since the arrival of Father Santander, the great persecution we have been suffering on account of our frequent Communions has greatly abated. Some people, who could not fancy our way of life, went to our Confessor to get him to prevent our going so often to Communion, and they said such unkind things about us, that if Our Lord had not protected us with His Almighty Hand, we should have got into great trouble. Still we did not complain; and as we tried to conform ourselves to God’s will, He moved the heart of our Confessor to continue his permission for Holy Communion. We are resolved to do nothing but what we are told, as we are sure that the order comes from God; and thus we obey with great joy, because we know perfectly well that we ought to do God’s will in all things.”

“There are some people who complain a great deal about our not wishing to keep up an acquaintance with them. We do not care to speak to anyone but our Confessor, for we know that God does not require anything further from us. But the more these people annoy us, the more we love them, and the more we try to commend them to God in our prayers. We have had to suffer a great deal from some of our Confessors, and the one we have at present, Father Gaspar de Pedrosa, is a man of high perfection; but he has mortified us pretty fairly. True, when one only looks at the Will of God, the bitterest things become sweet.” A letter of our Saint which seems to be an answer to this is extant,³3Obras Espirit., Tom. II., p. 272. in which he congratulates these holy souls on the persecutions and trials they had undergone.

To their other crosses there were added interior troubles. The first two years of their retirement, God gave them such sensible fervour, that the whole day, even when at work, their minds were occupied with continued meditation on the life and passion of Our Lord, only interrupted by spiritual reading. But the two following years they were tried by great dryness, till God again let His light shine out on their souls; so that, as Antonia told her Director, from that time forward they were led along a road of glory, and filled with a continual and burning charity and union with God.

The most affectionate love united together these two sisters. They shared the same bed, though one or other of them was often ill. They followed exactly the same practices of piety and penance, and the same frequency of Confession and Communion. Juliana was for a period tormented with scruples, and she wrote about her troubles to her saintly brother. He in reply gave her such wise direction, and so much to the point, that a learned and experienced theologian could not have done better.⁴4This is the letter of March 14, 1609. V. supra. Antonia, the younger of the two, during the latter years of her life, suffered from bad health, from continuous pains and weariness of body, all which she bore with extraordinary patience, carrying out the advice which St. Alonso gave them.

She would seem to have been more favoured both by nature and grace than her elder sister; she was gentler and more intelligent than Juliana, and was therefore more amiable and so of greater benefit to the persons whom she met. She made more rapid progress than her sister in perfection, and was apparently more favoured by God with external graces. Among these privileges was the revelation of the salvation of certain souls. When her prayers were asked for anyone who had died, she used to go to Communion for that intention, and while her Divine Guest was within her heart, she implored Him with all earnestness to free the soul of the departed from the prison-house of Purgatory. God would then transport her in spirit into Heaven, and show her the soul in glory. She told her Confessor that this had happened to her on ten different occasions with reference to ten different people. Another time, hearing of the death of Father Bartholomew del Hierro, a Jesuit of great sanctity and a native of Segovia, Antonia at once began to pray for his soul. It was evening, and she was in her little oratory, when suddenly she was surrounded with a bright light which seemed to stream from the coffin of Father del Hierro, and she beheld his soul in glory. What made her believe that he had gone straight to heaven was, that the vision had followed so quickly on the news of his death. She was favoured with the sight of many other Fathers of the Society in glory. On another occasion, as she was hearing the first Mass in the College Church, and was saying her Rosary in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, she saw a marvellous brightness and brilliance before the tabernacle. Another time, she saw a great glory coming from Majorca—a sign of the height of the sanctity of her holy Brother. Another day, when praying in her room at two o’clock in the morning, a radiance as of daybreak broke upon her, with a light in its midst like the sun; what its meaning was she did not gather, but it left her full of heavenly consolation.

Thus passed away her life in penance and prayer and with heaven half opened before her, very like in many things to her saintly Brother, until, in 1614, on July 7th,⁵5Janin, lib. iii., c. 3; v. Boll., p. 647. after some days of acute fever, which her weak state prevented her from surmounting, she went to her reward. It was late in the day when she expired, and it was arranged that she should be buried next morning. Juliana was asked where she would like to spend the night, as naturally it was thought that she would not wish to stay with the corpse in so small a house. But she answered that she desired to remain with her sister, nor had she any fear to do so. However, she could not refuse to accept the offer of some who were anxious to stay by the bedside. Next morning Juliana went as usual to hear the early Mass, in which she received Holy Communion, and she got back to her little home long before they came to bear away the body.

The funeral services were conducted like those of a person of high position. The chief gentlemen of the city claimed the honour of carrying the bier on their shoulders to the Jesuit Church, and the ladies of Segovia crowded its nave and aisles to assist at the ceremony. The body of Antonia was exposed in her semi-religious costume, and such was the devotion of the people that the bearers had to struggle to prevent her habit being cut up for relics. They laid her remains in a closed coffin in the chapel of Our Blessed Lady, which was then the next to the high altar on the Epistle side.⁶6The Lady Chapel is now in the transept on the Gospel side of the High Altar. No monument marks the graves of the Sisters.

Juliana had begged her dying sister to obtain for her the happiness of speedily following her. And confident that she would be heard, she told her Confessor that her time was short, and that she was anxious to spend it in penitential exercises. She asked to be allowed to pass the rest of her days fasting on bread and water. Her director wisely told her that he must take some time to consider such a request, and to pray for light about it. He then permitted her to fast for one day, but no longer, and meanwhile she was to report how her health stood the trial. He had, in fact, made up his mind not to allow her to continue the fast; and such was his final answer when she asked for extension of leave.

But she would not consent to accept the offer of anyone to keep her company in her solitary home, as she wished no one to be the witness of her life of prayer and penance. The memory of her holy sister, and the nearness of the reward, only added a stimulus to her piety. Scarcely a month and a half after her sister’s death, one day in August, Juliana had been to Confession and Holy Communion in the morning. Late on the same evening, a woman, whom she had asked to come to work for her, called her by name, at her door, as is the Spanish fashion when there is no bell; but she got no answer. The neighbours feared that there was something wrong. A ladder was brought, and they got in through a window. Juliana was found lifeless at the foot of the stairs, from which she had fallen, stricken by death on her way up or down. Her funeral was conducted with as much pomp and before as great a crowd as that of her sister, and she was laid side by side with her in Our Lady’s Chapel.

St. Alonso, more than a year and a half before,⁷7Memor., n. 177. Jan. 1612. in answer to his prayer, had received the promise that neither of his sisters should have to pass through Purgatory. On their death he begged earnestly to be allowed to see the degree of glory which they had gained. And Heaven was opened to him, and he beheld them kneeling before the Lamb, clad in garments of gold, and their faces beaming with joy. He was told that their splendid robes were a sign of the fervour of their love of God, and of the close tie of charity that had joined them together on earth; they were on their knees to signify their perpetual fidelity and prayer; and their joy sprang from their expectation of his soon being joined to them in their reward.