Elena Aiello: "a Eucharistic soul"

Summary:

Elena was born on April 10, 1895, in Cosenza, Calabria. She was the third of eight children born to Pasquale Aiello and Teresa Pagilla. Teresa died early in 1906, leaving her husband alone to look after the children. Little Elena enjoyed saying the simple prayers taught to her. In 1901, her father entrusted her education to the Daughters of Charity of the Most Precious Blood, where she spent many happy days.

She made her First Communion in 1904. Shortly afterwards, she had two accidents in quick succession. The second occurred when she drank a glass of water while laughing, causing her to cough constantly for fourteen months. She was prescribed medication, which only made things worse. One night, the Virgin Mary appeared to her and assured her that her cough would disappear. When she woke up, everyone confirmed the authenticity of the night apparition: Elena no longer coughed. The same observation was made by the family doctor in the hours that followed.

As a teenager, Elena hoped to become a nun. With the outbreak of the First World War, her father asked her to postpone her plans. She obeyed, devoting her time to helping the victims of the Spanish flu epidemic raging in the country. After the armistice, her father allowed her to take the veil. On August 18, 1920, she joined the Sisters of the Precious Blood.

One day, she was found lifeless on the floor of the convent laundry room. The sisters took her to the infirmary and found that her left shoulder was "black up to the neck". On March 25, 1921, in the dormitory, strapped to a chair, Elena underwent a gruesome operation to remove the necrotic black flesh from her shoulder, without anesthetic. She held a crucifix in her hands and an image of Our Lady of Sorrows was placed on her forehead. The incompetent doctor damaged the nerves, resulting in shoulder paralysis. The after-effects of the operation were dreadful. With superhuman willpower, she took part in convent life, even though her wound remained open. Her superior sent her home to receive appropriate care and heal before returning, if she so wished. Before taking leave of her community,  Elena wrote in her notebook that Jesus had already invited her to leave the convent …

Elena was very emaciated. Her left arm was paralyzed and the open shoulder wound was beginning to fill with vermin. A doctor in Cosenza declared that there was nothing he could do, as the nerves in the shoulder had been damaged. "Only a miracle can heal your condition; your wound may be gangrenous!" he told her. Shortly afterwards, Elena began to suffer from gastric problems; she was diagnosed with incurable stomach cancer.

One day, while praying before a statue of Saint Rita, she saw the image surrounded by a dazzling light. The following night, the saint appeared to her and advised her to begin a triduum in her honor. At the end of this triduum, Saint Rita appeared a second time and informed Elena that this triduum would have to be repeated if she wanted to be cured of stomach pains. Her shoulder, however, would not be cured for some time, as God asked her to "suffer this pain to atone for sins".

On October 21, 1921, Elena was suddenly cured of her gastric tumor. Her sister Evangelina, lying in the next room, saw a "brilliant light" fill the room. A moment later, Elena asked her family to bring her some food. In the following weeks, she announced that the wound on her shoulder would heal soon. In a letter to a bishop dated May 10, 1924, she wrote: "Around 3 p.m. yesterday, Jesus appeared to me and said: 'My daughter, do you want to be healed or do you want to suffer?' I replied: 'When one suffers with you, my Jesus, one can suffer anything,' and Jesus said to me again: 'Ah, well, I will heal you, but every Friday I will bring you into the darkness; you will be closer to me.’ After telling me this, he disappeared."

On the night of May 21, 1924, Saint Rita appeared in her room again  and announced to Elena that she would be cured at 3pm the following day. Shortly before 3pm the next day, after reciting the rosary, Elena began to pray... Her sister remembers: "She got up and approached the statue [of Saint Rita]. We had the impression that Saint Rita's outstretched hand, the one holding the crucifix, had moved aside to reach the hand on Elena's wounded side and lift it, and that a vibration was shaking the statue. Faced with our incredulity, Elena repeated, ‘I'm healed! I'm healed!’ When I bent down to look at the wound, it was closed, only a scar remained."

In the meantime, a major event occurred. On March 2, 1923, the first Friday of the month, after mass, a "voice" announced to Elena that Jesus was going to impart a new suffering to her, so that she could participate intimately in his Passion. By 3pm, Elena was bedridden, her shoulder aching.

Suddenly, Jesus appeared, dressed in white and wearing the crown of thorns. A dialogue ensued, at the end of which Christ removed the crown from his head and placed it on hers. Immediately, an abundant stream of blood flowed from her scalp.Then wounds appeared on her hands, feet and side. The family maid was working in an adjacent room. Surprised by the noise coming from Elena's room, she decided to go in to make sure everything was all right. She almost fainted when she discovered so much blood covering Elena's head and face. She immediately alerted the family, believing that Elena had been murdered. A doctor and a priest were called to her bedside. Doctor Adolfo Turano washed the wound, but blood continued to flow from the head for three hours without interruption, against all natural laws. Then the bleeding stopped on its own.

On the second Friday in March, shortly before 3 pm, Dr. Turano was called in again: a dozen people had witnessed the inexplicable flow of blood. The doctor tried to stop the hemorrhage with a handkerchief, but on contact with the tissue, the skin of the skull became so irritated that he had to stop.

On the third Friday of the same month, Virginia Manes, mother of doctor Aristodemo Milano, from the area of Catania, came to Elena's home to collect blood with a handkerchief to take back to her son. The woman wiped Elena's forehead with the piece of cloth, folded it and slipped it into her bag. When she returned home, she found the handkerchief "completely clean and without the slightest trace of blood". Her doctor son converted and asked to be baptized!

Elena's participation in Christ's Passion was evidenced every Friday by her "mystical death", observed by witnesses hundreds of times. The Blessed remained for several hours in a state of somnolence, interrupted only by the pain caused by her wounds. The position of her body resembled that of Jesus crucified: arms open and feet resting one on top of the other. The physiological changes were astonishing: hardly perceptible breath, extreme whiteness of the skin, stiffened muscles and, at times, eyes wide open, as if looking at some terrible distant vision.

No doctor has ever been able to explain such phenomena. How can a human being lose up to three liters of blood in the space of a few hours, and then feel so well a few moments later? After all, Elena recovered very quickly from the Friday Passion, in such a dramatic way that more than once, seeing her state of complete prostration, people feared for her life. But every Saturday morning, she got up, cheerful and alert, and went through her week of work and meetings, until the following Friday, when everything started all over again. Since the Middle Ages, there have been similar cases of stigmatization, whose timing mirrored the Church's liturgical calendar, and in which the natural healing process was bypassed or invisible.

An increasing number of people visited the one they called "the bleeding sister", prompting the clergy to take notice. Yet Elena answered all those who questioned her and, despite her suffering, she confided in the priests everything that happened to her: none of them ever expressed the slightest doubt about the authenticity of the phenomena.

In 1927, she had visions of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Paola and St. Therese of Lisieux. She began to issue prophecies of political and military nature.

On January 28, 1928, she founded the Minims Sisters of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to help poor children, prisoners of war and the destitute. It had a resounding success: by the time Elena died, 18 communities had already been established in Italy. In January 1948, a papal decree elevated the Institute to the rank of a congregation of pontifical right, and on July 8, 1949, an Italian government decree recognized its public utility. Pius XII granted her a private audience.

Inexplicable events occurred at the fledgling Institute where, within a few weeks, a hundred poor children started attending school. On one occasion, the "presence" of Saint Therese of Lisieux was perceived by a group of children working in the workshop. The noise that ensued prompted Elena to come and see what was happening. The girls told her they had seen a "Carmelite saint". On her way back upstairs, Elena saw St. Therese too.

But the house was poor and resources were often exhausted. 

On September 11, 1935, there was nothing left in the kitchen for lunch. Just as a sister had asked Elena for money, a priest rang the doorbell and offered to celebrate mass. Elena asked those present to attend the service. As the host was elevated, an "exquisite perfume" wafted through the chapel. The Office of the Virgin was intoned; Elena opened her booklet and, between two holy pictures (Our Lady of Sorrows and Saint Therese of Lisieux), she found a fifty-lire bill. She was sure she never put it there. At the end of the day, when the community gathered in the chapel for the evening service, a perfume identical to that of the morning was perceived by all. At the same time, the Blessed opened her booklet where she had found the bill and, between the two pious images, discovered an identical fifty-lire bill. The next morning, Elena explained the incident to the Institute's confessor, Canon Mazzuca, who was amazed but wrote down the events.

In 1934, poverty once again struck the community. A delivery of oil was made, but Elena had no money left to pay the invoice. She gathered the orphans around the chapel altar, and together they asked God to help them. Within moments, a man knocked on the door: it was an unknown benefactor who donated the exact sum needed to pay off her debt to the oil merchant.

Another event, also authenticated as part of Elena's beatification process, is worth noting. One day in 1937, Elena realized she had run out of bread for the children; at the same time, as she prayed to Jesus to help her, a city guard knocked on the door and kindly provided the Institute with 36 kilos of bread baked that very morning.

In parallel with the administration of her Institute, Elena made numerous prophecies. On May 6, 1940, "on the orders of Jesus", she wrote to Benito Mussolini to dissuade him from collaborating with Adolf Hitler, otherwise the Italian people would suffer terribly, and he himself would meet a terrible end (this happened with the public exhibition of the Duce's corpse in Milan in April 1945). The Duce had little faith in these "fantastical" tales, and was content to make a small donation to the Institute. The rest is history. Elena's prophecies announced the Cold War, the threat of Communism, the arms race, the de-Christianization of Western Europe, and even the troubling pronouncement (in the light of current events) that a war from Russia would affect the "West" of the European continent. Finally, she predicted the date and time of her own death.

On June 12, 1961, Mother Elena was taken to the San Giovanni hospital in Rome. The following night, the nurses noticed a "strong perfume" in her room. They said to her: "Mother, tomorrow is the feast of Saint Anthony, and he will certainly obtain your cure. - Tomorrow, neither Saint Anthony, nor Saint Rita, nor even Our Lady will work a miracle." She gave up her soul to God on June 19, 1961, at 6:19 a.m., just as she had predicted. Her cause for beatification was opened in 1982 and was granted in 2011.

Beyond reasons to believe:

Elena's charity work has enabled thousands of struggling young people to receive assistance and support.

Going further:

Article about Bl. Elena Aiello in Mystics of the Church website

More information:

• Aleteia article “This Saint Bore the Stigmata Every Good Friday for 38 Years” 
• Article “ Italian mystic who predicted fall of Mussolini beatified”