Servant of God

Vera Grita (-1969)

Salesian Cooperator

 

HER MYSTIC EXPERIENCE - 'BRING ME WITH YOU' (ENG)

 

 

 

 

HER BIOGRAPHY (Fr Cameroni, 2022)

 

PRAYER

 

O Blessed Trinity, I adore you and thank you
for giving us Vera of Jesus,
martyr of Eucharistic love.

 

I humbly ask you to help me to imitate her in her living love for Jesus in the Eucharist,
and to be like her, a Living Tabernacle
in constant communion with You,
so to be transparent of you within the world.

 

 

Following Vera’s example,

 

let the Eucharistic Jesus
be in me life given to the Father
and food of eternal life given to souls.

 

 

O Most Holy Trinity, I humbly ask you

 

to accept my prayer and to grant me,

 

through the intercession

 

of the Virgin Mary, Help of Christians

 

and her faithful daughter Vera,

 

the grace that I earnestly ask of you ...

 

 

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory be to the Father...

 

Short Life Sketch

 

Vera Grita teacher and Salesian Cooperator, was born in Rome on 28/01/1923 and died in Pietra Ligure on 22/12/1969 She became the messenger of Jesus for the Work of the Living Tabernacles.

 

 

Second child of four sisters, Vera lived and studied in Savona, where she became a teacher in the public education system. At the age of 21, during a sudden air raid on the city (1944) during the Second World War, Vera was trampled beneath a panic-stricken stampeding crowd, resulting in with suffering and pain that would accompany her for the rest of her life.

 

 

Vera lived a largely unremarkable life, teaching in remote schools in the countryside, winning the respect and affection of those around her, loved by by everyone for her good and gentle character.

 

A Salesian Cooperator since 1967, she fulfilled her call for total self-giving to the Lord, who, in an extraordinary way, responded by giving himself to her, in her heart, with his “Voice”, his “Word”, dictating step by step the “Work of the Living Tabernacles”. She submitted every page to her spiritual guide, Salesian Fr Gabriele Zucconi, who was also a priest loved and chosen by the Lord to bring the Eucharistic message and mandate, of which Vera was merely the spokesperson, to fulfilment.

 

Vera kept the secret of that call in the silence of her heart, retracing the path of the great mystics in her asceticism. In this she was led by the Divine Master and the Virgin Mary, who accompanied her along the path of her hidden life of  dispossession and self-annihilation in imitation of the mystical life of Jesus within the Holy Eucharist.

 

Her collection of writings was published in 1989 by her sisters Pina and Liliana Grita, 20 years after her death (Opera dei Tabernacoli Viventi, Segno)

 

The messages express the Lord’s desire to live in full, deep and continuous communion with the souls who receive him in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, to transform them into living Tabernacles, sacred Temples of his Eucharistic presence. With these new Tabernacles, Jesus seeks to make his hidden life at Nazareth a part of the world today. The Good Shepherd seeks to walk the streets of our daily lives, to live beside the souls who have drifted away from Him, and win them back through His love.

 

Vera tied her life to the Work of the Living Tabernacles making a vow to be a small hidden victim for the triumph of the Eucharistic Jesus in souls, and a vow of obedience to her spiritual guide, he too having given himself totally, as a victim, for the Work of Jesus’ Love. For her faithfulness and his love Jesus gave her his name: "I have given you my Holy Name, and from now on you will be and will call yourself ‘Vera di Gesù’ – meaning truly/entirely of Jesus.”

 

She died on 22 December 1969, at 46 years of age, in a hospital room where she had spent the last six months of her life, amidst increasing suffering which she wholeheartedly accepted in union with the Crucified Jesus. In 1999, the Archdiocese of Turin recognized and approved the Association of Living Tabernacles. On 22 December 2019, the 50^th anniversary of her death, the process of beatification officially begun in Savona.

 

 

According to Fr Borra, the Salesian who was her first biographer, “Through the messages she received and the letters she wrote, Vera’s soul joins the number of souls called to enrich the Church with flames of love for God and for Jesus in the Eucharist, all for the growth of the Kingdom.”