Saint Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception

She was born on August 19, 1910, at Kudamalur, in the diocese of Changanacherry, to the old Syro-Malabar family of Muttathupadathu. ²⁵ Her birth came early. The Holy See's biography and the shrine at Bharananganam both tell how her mother, eight months pregnant, woke to find a snake wrapped around her waist, and how the fright brought the baby on. ²⁵ She was baptized Annakutty, a diminutive of Anne: on August 28, eight days after her birth, according to the Holy See, or on August 27, according to the shrine. ²⁵ The Holy See calls her the last of five children; the shrine calls her the fourth. ²⁵

Her mother died soon after, three months later in the Holy See's account, a few weeks in the shrine's. ²⁵ Annakutty spent her first years with her grandparents at Elumparambil, where her grandmother taught her to pray and to give to the poor; by five, the Holy See says, she was leading the family's evening prayer in the household "prayer room". ² She made her first Communion on November 11, 1917, and told her friends: "Do you know why I am so particularly happy today? It is because I have Jesus in my heart!" ² Years later she wrote to her spiritual father that "already from the age of seven I was no longer mine." ² At school in Thonnankuzhy she made friends with the Hindu children. ²

In 1920 she moved to Muttuchira, to the aunt her mother had chosen to raise her: Anna Murickal, in the Holy See's biography, her mother's sister Annamma of the Murickan family, in the shrine's. ²⁵ The Holy See describes the aunt as severe and demanding, "at times despotic and violent", and determined to make an advantageous marriage for the girl in spite of the clear signs of her vocation. ²

A marriage was arranged when Annakutty was thirteen. To escape it she put her foot into a heap of burning embers, and the burn was severe. ² She described the night herself: "My marriage was arranged when I was thirteen years old. What had I to do to avoid it? I prayed all that night... then an idea came to me. If my body were a little disfigured no one would want me! ... O, how I suffered!" ² It did not end the matter. The Holy See says she had to defend her vocation for years afterward, even during her probation, when someone tried to marry her off with the complicity of the mistress of formation herself. ²

Her confessor, Father James Muricken, turned her toward Franciscan spirituality and the Congregation of the Franciscan Clarists. ² On May 24, 1927, she entered their school at Bharananganam as a boarder. ² On August 2, 1928, she began her postulancy, taking the name Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception after Saint Alphonsus Liguori, whose feast it was that day. ²⁵ She received the habit on May 19, 1930. ²⁵

Illness followed almost at once. She was able to teach at the school at Vakakkad for only one year, 1932 in the Holy See's English and 1932-33 in the shrine's account; after that she worked as an assistant teacher and parish catechist and, because of her beautiful handwriting, wrote official letters. ²⁵ Her health kept her out of the canonical novitiate until August 12, 1935, and about a week after she began it she was bleeding from the nose and eyes and had open sores on her legs. ² The worst was feared. During a novena to Kuriakose Elias Chavara, the Holy See says, she was cured instantaneously. ² The shrine tells it more fully: on the last day of the novena, it says, Chavara appeared to her, blessed her, and told her she was cured of this illness but would always have other sufferings to bear. ⁵ John Paul II noted that she had a personal devotion to him from early in her religious life. ³

She made her perpetual profession on August 12, 1936, the feast of Saint Clare. ²⁵ Two days later she came back to Bharananganam, and she wrote that "from that time, it seems, I was entrusted with a part of the cross of Christ." ²

The illnesses came one after another: typhoid, double pneumonia, and then, on the night of October 18, 1940, a fright at the sight of a thief in her room that left her in a nervous collapse for about a year, unable to read or write. ²⁵ In 1945 a tumor spread through her body, and gastroenteritis and liver trouble brought convulsions and vomiting, the Holy See says, up to forty times a day. ² Her last year was, in its words, a continuous agony. ²

John Paul II, beatifying her, spoke of more than the bodily pain: she also bore "the spiritual suffering of being misunderstood and misjudged by others." ³ Yet he also described her as having "an affectionate and happy disposition, with the ability to take delight in ordinary and simple things." ³ In November 1944 she wrote to her spiritual director that she felt "God has intended my life to be an oblation, a sacrifice of suffering"; in February 1946, that "my only desire in this world is to suffer for love of God and to rejoice in doing it." ³

She died at the convent at half past noon on Sunday, July 28, 1946. ²⁵ The shrine says no one standing by her bed noticed the moment, and that her funeral the next day was very simple. ⁵ It records the words of her spiritual director, Father Romulus, at the Requiem Mass: "If it is God's Holy Will, this place will become the Lisieux of India." ⁵

According to the shrine, schoolchildren began bringing flowers and candles to her grave the day after the funeral, and the cause was formally opened on December 2, 1953. ⁵ John Paul II beatified her at Kottayam on February 8, 1986, together with Kuriakose Elias Chavara, and said it was the first time a pope had raised a son and a daughter of the Church in India to the altars in their own land. ³ Her path, he said, "was clearly a different one" from Chavara's: "It was the way of the Cross, the way of sickness and suffering." ³

Benedict XVI canonized her in Saint Peter's Square on October 12, 2008. ¹⁷ He called her an "exceptional woman, who today is offered to the people of India as their first canonized saint", and said she was "convinced that her cross was the very means of reaching the heavenly banquet prepared for her by the Father." ¹ At the Angelus the same day he greeted the delegation from India and spoke of "her heroic virtues of patience, fortitude and perseverance in the midst of deep suffering." ⁴ The shrine says pilgrims of every caste, creed and religion now come to her tomb. ⁵

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Alphonsa, so none is given here. ¹²³⁷ Benedict XVI presented her to the people of India as their first canonized saint, which is a title, not a patronage. ¹

Saint Alphonsa's feast is kept on July 28, the anniversary of her death. ⁶⁷ The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives it as her liturgical memorial, and the shrine at Bharananganam calls it its main feast, preceded by nine days of novenas and candlelit processions, when tens of thousands of people come to the town. ⁶⁷

Her life does not make suffering look easy, and the sources do not pretend it was. They record convulsions, a year in which she could not read or write, and the pain of being misjudged by the people around her. ²³ The joy John Paul II saw in her sat alongside all of it rather than replacing it. ³

She found her way to religious life against her family's plans, and the means she chose at thirteen were desperate. ² The Church canonized the life that followed, not that act, and a page about her does not have to call it wise.

The resolutions she wrote after her cure in the novitiate are small and ordinary: never to reject anyone, to speak only sweet words to others, never to complain. ² They were written by a young woman who would be ill for most of the next ten years, and who, the Holy See says, bore it silently and kept her charity toward her sisters. ²

John Paul II told the religious of India that whether their service looked like Chavara's great works or "takes the form of hidden suffering like Sister Alphonsa", it was important in the life of the Church. ³ Almost all of her religious life was spent at Bharananganam, and that was where she became a saint. ²⁵