Pauline of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus

The work of Pauline's entire life is the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, born on July 12, 1890, from the care provided to an incurable patient and considered the first female religious congregation founded in Brazil. With her first companions, including Virginia Nicolodi and Teresa Anna Maule, she pronounced her vows and took the name Pauline of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus, an expression of her devotion to the Passion of Christ. Elected Superior General in 1903, she left Nova Trento for the Ipiranga district in São Paulo, where she welcomed orphans, children of freed slaves after the abolition of 1888, and destitute elderly people. In 1909, the Archbishop of São Paulo, Duarte Leopoldo e Silva, relieved her of her duties and sent her to care for the sick and elderly nuns in Bragança Paulista, where she lived from then on a hidden existence, made of prayer and service. The congregation received a decree of praise from the Holy See in 1933, a sign of its ecclesial recognition, and spread beyond Brazil.

Pauline's spirituality is rooted in the contemplation of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus, that is to say, the suffering love of Christ, which she seeks to extend by serving the most abandoned. Her journey is marked by a tested humility: removed from her position as superior in 1909, she accepts without bitterness an unobtrusive life among the sick, making obedience and abandonment to Divine Providence the heart of her interior life. During the fiftieth anniversary of the congregation in 1940, she left her sisters a true spiritual testament, exhorting them to humility and unwavering trust in God despite contrary winds. Her final years, darkened by diabetes, several amputations, and blindness, were lived in the same peace: her last words, "May the will of God be done," summarize an existence entirely placed in the hands of God. This fidelity in darkness nurtured, after her death, a reputation for holiness that would open her beatification process.

Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Pauline on October 18, 1991, during his apostolic journey to Brazil, in Florianópolis, in the state of Santa Catarina where she had begun her work. The beatification followed the recognition of a healing deemed miraculous attributed to her intercession. After the approval of a second miracle, the same pope proclaimed her a saint on May 19, 2002, in Saint Peter's Square in Rome, making her the first saint born or having lived in Brazil to be canonized. On this occasion, the Holy See published an official biography retracing her journey from an emigrant to a foundress. Her liturgical memorial is celebrated on July 9, the anniversary of her death. Her canonization, welcomed with great fervor in Brazil, consecrated the figure of a religious sister who came from Europe and became one of the most popular saints in Latin America.

The legacy of Saint Pauline continues first in the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, which carries on her charism of service to the sick, the elderly, and the most destitute, in Brazil and beyond. Her figure as an immigrant foundress, who went from poverty to a lasting work of charity, makes her a major reference of Brazilian holiness and one of the most venerated saints in the country. A significant sanctuary is dedicated to her in Nova Trento, in the state of Santa Catarina, which has become a place of pilgrimage that attracts many faithful. Due to her long ordeal with illness and her attention to the dying, popular devotion readily invokes her for the sick, the dying, and those afflicted by suffering, often also associated with people suffering from diabetes. Her memory remains vivid in the Church of Brazil, where she embodies the humble fidelity and confident abandonment to Providence that she recommended to her sisters.