PRESENTATION

This tiny publication has the purpose of making known an event that took place in the years 1950-953. It was kept silent for nearly forty years but finally, as the Blessed Virgin Mary had promised the visionary, it was brought to the attention of the public already about ten years ago.

The desire to fulfil the request of the Blessed Virgin urges us to make it widely known, even if only in brief. Its importance must be really striking if the devil has done his best to prevent its spread, as we shall see later on.

The protagonist in this story is a Clare nun, sister Chiara Scarabelli, born on 29th March 1912 in Genepreto, a small village in ‘Val Tidone', in the province of Piacenza . She died on 29th January 1994 , in the new monastery of ‘San Silvestro di Curtatone (MN)', that had been inaugurated only a few months before her death. She lived for nearly sixty-three years in the monastery of Saint Clare in Venice , ‘Piazzale Roma', where the extraordinary events related in this work took place [1].

This humble Clare nun took care to hide the extraordinary in the ordinary and cloth her heroism in normality, to such a degree that not even her sisters, with whom she lived for more than sixty-two years, had any suspicion that there was anything special hidden in her life.

Even now they find it hard to convince themselves that, concealed in that sister, who seemed just like them in every way, was a mistery of exceptional grace.

In order to understand this, it is necessary to take seriously the sentence with which sister Chiara ended her most heroic self-offerings: "That no one may notice….Known only to you and Mother” [2].

In 1950, whilst she was in nocturnal adoration (something she practised every night, from 11pm until 2am, for more than sixty years) the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to her and entrusted her with a mission whose story we will tell briefly in this little book, making use of the account that she herself wrote at the request of the priest who directed her spiritually during the last period of her life.

This mystical experience is linked to the request made by the blessed Virgin Mary to the Church, during her apparitions at Fatima , to consecrate mankind to her lmmaculate Heart.

Mary chose an instrument for this mission who was, at the same time, a sublime model of lived Marian consecration.

The relationship of this humble Clare nun with the blessed Virgin Mary, whom she simply called "Mother”, is of such an intensity and richness that it is hard to imagine a more profound one..

It is difficu1t, in this little work, to describe an existence that opened itself unconditionally to Mary as her Mother and in whose heart she had made her stable home since the first years of her adolescence.

For Sister Chiara "to be in Mother's heart" meant to live uniquely and exclusively from its special, secret contents.

She wished to incarnate in her existence the faith, the abandonment and the docility of Mary to the will of God..

Pope Paul VI in Marialis Cultus states: “In the Virgin Mary everything is relative to Christ and everything depends on Him”.

This assertion finds admirable confirmation in the experience of sister Chiara who, both in Mary and by Mary , is associated to Christ in an extraordinary tension.

Even though she loves Jesus passionately, there is in her heart what she calls “martyrdom of love” , a fire that burns her from within and causes her to suffer terribly because she does not love Him as she would. This martyrdom will finish only at the end of her life when she will feel to love Him with Mother' s heart.

[Figura, omissis]

Venice . The church and monastery of the Clare nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, the sweet nest that sister Maria Chiara entered at the age of 19 and where she spent 62 years, consuming herself as a gift of love to Christ and her brethren.

To those who asked him if they could sit on his left and right side, Jesus replied: “Can you drink the chalice that I must drink?”

Sister Chiara, urged by the spirit of the blessed Virgin Mary, asked with insistence, as a grace, to drink the chalice of Jesus not for the primacy of honour, but for the primacy of pure love: “ May I be the last in everything, but the first in love”.

Jesus accepted to die on the cross to save us, and Mary, his mother, lived in her heart the death of her son at the foot of the cross. Sister Chiara, driven by the example of the Holy Mother, asked to unite her life as a holocaust, for the salvation of all souls, to the only salvific sacrifice of Christ.

On Calvary Hill everything was consumed in the proclamation of Mary's universal maternity: “Woman, this is your son” . Mary wanted this mystery of indescribable love to be reflected in the heart of her little child, giving her the task of asking the salvation of all souls in a prayer that became the breath of her soul: “That all, all may be saved, that none of my sinful brothers may go lost”.

To conclude, sister Chiara lived her Marian consecration putting her life at a docile, total and unconditioned disposal of her Heavenly Mother so that she might make of it an epiphany of her maternal ‘ Yes' .

Let us allow her, at this point, to tell the story of the gift that the Heavenly Mother wanted to make to all her dear children who love Her and live the consecration made to her Heart.

1. The personality of this Clare nun can be known , even if still partially, from two books: “Sister Chiara Scarabelli - Very Pure Icon of the Virgin Mary”. by Monsignor Luigi Montanari, and “ The Fire of Love”, by Fra Alessandro Domenicale ofm.

2. The reading of the paper “How I spend my day”, that she delivered to her spiritual Father, allows us to catch the mark of extraordinary in the seeming daily monotony.