Blessed Eusebia Palomino (1899-1935)

The beatitude of the little ones

The vocation of a Daughter of Mary Help of Christians

It is Mary Help of Christians who from their first meeting marks the vocational story of Eusebia, as she herself says: “One Sunday as we were coming out of the Jesuits’ church (the famous church of Clerecia in Salamanca), where we had gone with many other girls to listen to a sermon, I saw that a procession was going by and I asked what the procession was. They told me that it was Mary Help of Christians who was coming out of the house of the Salesians. So I waited to watch. When it arrived where I was standing, they stopped in front of me and seeing Mary Help of Christians I felt attracted to her. I knelt down and very fervently said to her: “You know, Mother mine, that what I want is to be pleasing to you, to be always yours and to become a saint.” I said this with such fervour that tears ran down my cheeks. “You know, Mother mine, that if I could and had the money I would enter some house and become a religious, to serve you better, but I’m a poor little girl (pobrecita) and I don’t have anything.” Nevertheless, within my heart I felt something very great; the consolation and the satisfaction I felt made me shed a great many tears. Less than a fortnight after this event I found myself at the house of the Salesian Sisters, and as I was going in, the Sister at the door, Sr Concepción Asencio, took me into the chapel. I had only just entered when I was in the presence of Mary Help of Christians, and seeing her I felt something so great that I cannot explain it and I fell to my knees at her feet. Then in my heart I heard her say to me: “This is where I want you to be”. The Daughters of Mary Help of Christians decided to ask her to help in the community. Eusebia was only too willing to accept and immediately set to work: she helped in the kitchen, she carried wood, cleaned the house, hung out the washing in the large courtyard, accompanied the group of students to the state school and did other errands in the city.

Eusebia’s secret wish, to consecrate herself entirely to the Lord, now became more than ever the inspiration and subject of all her prayers, of everything she did. She says: “If I carry out my duties well the Virgin Mary will be pleased and I shall succeed one day in being her daughter in the Institute.” She did not dare to ask because of her poverty and lack of education; she did not consider herself worthy of such a grace: it is such a large Congregation – she thinks. The Visiting Superior in whom she confided, received her with motherly kindness and re-assured her: “Don’t worry about anything.” And very willingly, in the name of the Mother General, she decided to admit her.

She was sent to the house in Valverde del Camino, a small place with, at the time, 9,000 inhabitants, in the extreme south-west of Spain, in the mining district of Andalusia near the frontier with Portugal. The girls in the school and in the oratory, on first meeting her did not hide a certain disappointment: the new arrival was a rather insignificant person, small and pale, not at all beautiful, with large hands and even more an ugly name. She was happy “to be in the house of the Lord all the days of her life.” In this “royal” situation where her heart lived in the highest realms of love, she felt especially honoured. The little girls who go to the house of the Sisters, however, are soon captivated by her stories about missionaries, or the lives of the saints, or episodes of Marian devotion, or anecdotes about Don Bosco, which she remembers thanks to a very good memory and is able to make interesting and persuasive through the force of her personal conviction and of her simple faith. Gradually the little girls are joined by the more mischievous teenagers, the more critical and sophisticated older girls who find in that little Sister an inexplicable fascination, an aura of holiness, which transports them into an unknown world. And even outside the oratory people begin to talk quite openly about holiness. Then there begin to arrive in the playground, and, their interest aroused, to stay the parents of the oratory girls, other adults, then young seminarians looking for advice. A few years later many of these girls will be among the postulants at Barcellona-Sarrià. And Mother Covi, the Provincial, surprised by so many vocations asked: "But what is going on at Valverde?", and they replied that there was a Sister in the kitchen with asthma who was good at telling stories to the girls. Later there will be priests who turn to that humble Sister, quite without theological expertise, but with a heart overflowing with the wisdom of God. Soon a whole series of facts and anecdotes was passing from mouth to mouth. Seminarians, sisters, priests, girls, went to consult Sr Eusebia about their future life, while she was hanging out the washing in the garden or peeling potatoes in the kitchen. And quite calmly she advised them, described their future, encouraged a genuine vocation, or discouraged one which was not. And if anyone asked her how she knew these things, she used to reply with a phrase Don Bosco had used many times: "I had a dream."

Everything about Sr Eusebia reflects the love of God and the strong desire to make him loved: her busy days constantly reflect this and her favourite topics of conversation confirm it: in the first place the love of Jesus for everyone, whom his Passion has saved. The holy Wounds of Jesus are the book which Sr Eusebia reads every day, and from which she draws lessons through a simple “rosary” which she frequently recommends to everyone. In her letters she is an apostle of devotion to the Merciful Love according to the revelations made by Jesus to Saint Faustina Kowalska. The other “focus” of Sr Eusebia’s piety and catechesis is the “true Marian devotion” taught by Saint Louis M. Grignon de Montfort. It will be the soul and the heart Sr Eusebia’s apostolate for the whole of her short life: dedicated to the girls, to young people, mothers of families, seminarians and priests.

When at the beginning of the ‘30s, Spain was starting to be convulsed by revolution, by the madness of the atheists vowed to the extermination of religion, Sr Eusebia did not hesitate to take to its extreme consequences that principle of “availability,” ready literally to strip herself of everything. She offered herself to the Lord as a victim for the salvation of Spain, for the freedom of religion. God accepted the victim.