Mother Rosetta and the Paschal Mystery

Rome (Italy). Forty years after her birth into heaven, a “Via Crucis”, prepared by Sister Maria Concetta Ventura, of Mother Maddalena Morano Province (ISI), with reflections taken from the writings of the Servant of God Mother Rosetta Marchese, recalls the most significant features of her spiritual profile.

Mother Rosetta Marchese (1920-1984) lived her life spiritually united to the Paschal Mystery and ended her life by offering herself for the sanctification of the FMA Institute, young people, and priests. She made her own the attitude of Jesus, the obedient and crucified Son (Lamb of God) who loves the Father, and that of the Mother of God, Servant of Yahweh, because both live in constant adherence to the Divine Will. Mother Rosetta only sought God whom she found in everything and in everyone. She saw in Jesus her Bridegroom crucified for love. Her only desire was to resemble Him. For this it was necessary to live well the suffering, the mortifications, the small crosses of everyday life.

On 31 May 1961, she wrote to her Spiritual Father, the Servant of God Msgr. Francesco Fasola:

“I read such a beautiful page on the commentary to the Directory, ‘Before the host is consecrated, the priest repeats many signs of the cross on it, as if to mean that one cannot become Jesus without being marked by the cross’. How I loved that thought! I really always have so little to suffer, but I understand that to be a ‘pure, holy, and immaculate host’, I must pass through that. In this month, I don’t want to miss any occasion of suffering and mortification; I want to be careful, careful”.

On the night of Holy Thursday 1965, Jesus, in a locution, asks her to accept His torment of love that brought Him to the gift of Himself at the Last Supper, to the agony in Gethsemane, and to death on the cross next to His loving and suffering Mother.

“Do you want to accept the torment of my love? Jesus! It frightens me, but beside Your Holy Agony, united to the humiliations of this Your Holy Night, lost in the mystery of Your Love annihilated in the Eucharist, I cannot but tell you yes. Jesus! Grant that your word may always remain in me and becomes life. Sorrowful Mother. loving Mother, I am Yours!”.

The life of Mother Rosetta was a progressive gift in love that reached the total offering, but grew through small mortifications and invisible daily sacrifices. This is how she lives her baptismal priesthood. She joins Jesus who, in the Last Supper, offers His body and his blood as food and drink for all. “Thus, I see my Priesthood in Jesus. Let Him accomplish in my soul the ‘take and eat all’ and the ‘get up and go’ so that the Father is glorified in everything and always”.

She writes in her notebook on Holy Thursday of the year 1969:

“Our Lady makes shine in me with lively light, the name with which Jesus called me in the intimate secret of my heart ten years ago, in the chapel of Caltagirone. She, the Mother, in her Immaculate Heart consecrates me as a Host of Praise. Host, given, all to be consumed, eaten by souls, in serene availability, without my movement, in the divine repose of my Jesus. I am in Him and He is administered to the souls through my letting myself be sent, completely, without ever withdrawing, going to meet every weight for Him. Give praise so that the Father be glorified in this little daughter, lost in Jesus, eaten by others. And for the Father to be glorified I must live with Jesus, always, His ‘”Get up, let us go’ towards the sacrificial Will of the Father in which all glorification is enclosed”.

After putting herself at the school of the cross as the source of true love, she shared with Sister Rina Coffele in another letter of 2 September 1980, “Joys and sufferings are always interwoven; but where there is the cross carried and loved together there is the surest presence of Jesus. On the other hand, without suffering there can be no true love. Let us help each other to look at suffering as the most beautiful gift of Jesus”.

In her conferences, she speaks to the Sisters with expressions of love for Christ Crucified:

“If I am accustomed to contemplate Jesus who carries the wood of the cross, the torment of the malefactors, the most humiliating things there could be, I succeed more willingly to accept the crosses of every day, because I want to carry my cross with Him. If I am accustomed to contemplate Jesus fallen under the weight of the cross, Jesus with His face in the dust, in the mud, that face dirty with tears, blood, and dust.

If I am accustomed to contemplating Jesus in this supreme annihilation, fallen to the ground, struggling to get up, no longer able to see the road, in the bloody veil that descends on his eyes, tell me if I cannot accept the fatigue of my work, the moral sufferings that sometimes collapse me. I accept them more willingly, because I know I am conforming to Him, participating with Him in the work of redemption, of salvation for souls. If I am accustomed to contemplate Him in the humiliation of being deprived of His clothes, stripped naked, then I understand the total stripping that is worked in so many ways, and I accept it.

If I am accustomed to contemplating Jesus who lets Himself be crucified, who suffers three hours of agony in a terrible suffering; if I can contemplate Mary who lives the passion with Jesus, the unheard-of sufferings of crucifixion and death, there is no pain that frightens me and I can accept any pain: physical, moral, spiritual, and I see it in this perspective, the saving perspective. My small suffering, I say small because however great it is, close to that of Jesus, it is always small. My small suffering then, united to His, makes me co-redemptrix with Mary”.

The offering of her life for the holiness of the Institute was the last act of a life configured to Christ Crucified, in making herself bread broken for the Glory of the Father, for the Sisters and young people.  Almost a year before her death, she wrote to the FMA:

“Remind everyone that nobody becomes a saint without being assigned their part of cross. And that there is an intimate indissoluble link between passion and mission. Let us look together at Jesus. Let us learn together from Him that the synergy of filiation with the Father is accomplished with the offering of self until death. ‘This is my body given for you; this is my blood shed for you for the remission of sin!’ There is so much evil to atone for, our sins and that of our recipients. There are many good seeds to be irrigated with the chalice of the New Covenant. There is a potential for grace to be implored through meditation on the Paschal Mystery”.

VIA CRUCIS