Luigina Sinapi, Italian Mystic

Luigina Sinapi

Servant of God Luigina Sinapi, Mystic (1916-1978)

-Was born on the feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary and was miraculously cured on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary

Early Life

Luigina Sinapi was born September 8, 1916 at Itri (Latina), Italy. She was the eldest of five children of Francis Paul Sinapi, a cabinet maker, and Filomena Catena, a licensed midwife. She was born together with a twin girl, who tragically died the same day. Her parents feared they might lose Luigina also, and therefore her birth was registered only two days later. She was baptized with the name of Luigia, but her family and friends always called her Luigina or simply just Gina.

“Beginning in her early childhood, Luigina felt a strong love for Jesus that manifested itself in a desire to live in intimate union with Him, to which she felt herself particularly attracted” writes Cardinal Vallini. Her mother was a pious Catholic, and on one occasion she went to San Giovanni Rotondo to recommend her husband and her daughter to Padre Pio. The good Padre said to her mother: "You have one child in Heaven [referring to Luigina’s twin sister who died at childbirth] and the Lord has great designs on the other who is here on earth”. This was confirmed by Fr. Tarcisio, OFM. Cap. (Zurlo) from Cervinara, the sacristan who was the assistant to Padre Pio.

In 1922 at age 6 she started elementary school, and at age eight she received Jesus for the first time in Holy Communion and also the Sacrament of Confirmation, as was the custom at that time. From that day she never neglected to receive the Eucharist, and if she was sometimes prevented to receive it for I serious reasons she cried, and to whomever derided her she said; "If I don't receive Jesus in my heart, I don't live."

She was "lively and impulsive", remembered one of her younger brothers, as she had the habit of reading to them a passage from the Gospel while their mother was out working, "she would even comment on it", her brother stated. Concerning herself she said with a slight smile "I was always a terrible child.", but others who knew her all recall her being a very good girl.

At 16 years old, Luigina was fascinated by the ideal of the Daughter of St Paul 'to spread the Gospel by the most modern means of communications', so overcoming the resistance of her parents she entered the institute the Pious Society of the Daughters of St. Paul in Rome. Unfortunately she was obliged to leave the institute because of her delicate health. She was comforted by her spiritual director, Blessed Father Guiseppe Timoteo Giaccardo, who exhorted her to offer her life for souls, and to remain in the Pauline family as a laywoman.

Her miraculous cure on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, August 15

Some particularly extraordinary events marked her life. When she was 17 her mother died suddenly, and she took over the care of her younger brothers. It was not long after that she began experiencing extreme pain in her stomach and she was soon diagnosed with a tumour on the bottom part of the right intestine. The physician could not operate as he believed she would not survive the operation. As the days passed she grew more and more ill and her pain and suffering became more and more acute. 

On August 15, 1933, she and others believed that her last day had arrived. Luigina asked her grandmother to dress her and prepare her for the great passage from earth to heaven, and with much devotion she received the Sacrament of the Sick. She was already in what seemed to be her last agony when suddenly Jesus appeared close to her bed and smiled at her. In her simple childlike confidence and love which from her earliest years she had always addressed Jesus in her prayers Luigina looked at Jesus and said to Him in a loving reproach: "You have not shown Yourself to me for two long years and now that I am dying, you come?"

Then smiling Jesus replied to her: “I have come to give you a beautiful gift. Look!" and He looked towards the other side of the bed where to her great surprise Luigina saw a most beautiful woman sweetly smiling at her. Luigina, believing that it was her own mother who had come with Jesus to take her, exclaimed: "Oh! you have become so beautiful in Heaven, mother? So much so I don't recognize you!" 

But then Jesus said to her: "Look at little closer!"

Luigina Sinapi

Luigina then realized that the beautiful woman was the Blessed Virgin Mary. Jesus asked her: "We have come to make you a proposal. You are free to choose. Do you want to die and to ascend into paradise, or would you be willing to offer yourself as a victim for the Church and for Priests? ".

As in a very fast film, the Servant of God saw then the situation of the Church and so many priests and religious who were living in danger of losing their souls. She then decided to stay and offer her future life to Jesus, "accepting the hidden sacrifice of victim for the Church, and for priests."

Jesus tells her that she is not to become a nun, but to remain as a lay person in the world. He tells her that she will often be misunderstood, and that she will suffer much, and that she will die alone. He told her she is to be like a violet, hidden but always perfumed. Jesus then presented His Mother to her, to be her special advocate, guide and comfort. "From this point on, the Madonna entered into the life of Luigina by special right", commented Fr. Tarcisio. When Jesus finished speaking, her guardian Angel Samuel took her by the hand, and suddenly she found herself completely healed.

After her miraculous cure, the Blessed Virgin Mary would appear to her on First Saturdays and other special Feast days of the Church.  

From that day, she was always faithful to the simple program which she had clearly felt inside herself: to be a simple lay person living her intense spiritual life mostly hidden from the eyes of the world; to suffer much, and be "a little mustard seed in a furrow in Rome".

In 1934 the family home was lost and the family dismembered, her little brothers were taken by relatives or sent to boarding school while Luigina went to Rome to live with an aunt, working at home, then at the Post Office, and then in the Bureau of Statistics.

Luigina is linked to the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Bruno Cornacchiola at Tre Fontane

On April 12, 1937, as President of the Daughters of Mary she had taken a pilgrimage to Tre Fontane, where St. Paul had suffered martyrdom. One woman who travelled with her (and later chose to enter religious life and became Sister Lidia) remembers:  "You saw that she [Luigina] would pray fervently, but seemingly without much effort. I only now understand what was happening at that time: she was a person of an intense interior life, one who is continuously in relationship with God, very balanced, simple, and very amiable...these people often do not distinguish themselves in any thing, however they distinguish themselves in this."

While she was walking in a grotto near a grove of eucalyptus trees, Luigina saw something that deeply aroused her piety: she found some small bones that would seem human, and she realized they were likely the gruesome remains of an abortion. Saying a prayer or mercy and forgiveness she dug a little and buried a Miraculous medal together with the little bones.

Suddenly in a great light before her she saw the Blessed Virgin Mary, Who said to her:

"I will return to this place of sin and I will convert and make use of a man who combats the Church, and who will desire to kill the Pope. Go to St. Peter's Square and there you will find a lady dressed in black, who will take you to her brother who is a cardinal. To him you will transmit what I have just told you, and you are to tell him also that soon he will become Pope".

Luigina did as told; she went to St Peters square and came upon the woman dressed in black—it was the Marquise Pacelli, who introduced her to Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. Luigina confided to him the message that she had for him, who answered only: "If they are roses they will bloom ". Two years later he was elected Pope with the name of Pius XII.

Bruno Cornacchiola

In 1947, exactly ten years later and in the same place which The Virgin appeared to Luigina - where there is now the Sanctuary of "Blessed Mary of the Third Millennium at the Tre fontane" - the Virgin had then appeared to a certain Bruno Cornacchiola with his children to tell him: "Enough! Re-enter into the true sheepfold of Christ... my Body could not decay and it did not decay ... ". 
Bruno was a protestant tram driver, a former soldier in Spain, and deeply hostile to the Catholic Church. It was just in the days prior to the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing to him that he had decided to assassinate the Pope. But now he began a most extraordinary conversion which shocked and stunned many in the Catholic church in Rome.

For his part, Pope Pius XII didn't hesitate at all and immediately believed in the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Bruno Cornacchiola at Tre Fontane since he was already aware of it for years through the message of Luigina Sinapi. Six months later, October 5, 1947, in St. Peter's Square, Pope Pius XII blessed the statue of the 'Virgin of Revelation" of actual human height, brought to Tre Fontane in solemn procession. Bruno Cornacchiola himself was received subsequently in audience by the Pontiff so that he could consign to him the dagger with which he intended to kill him. When the Pope was asked about all this, Fr. Gabrio Lombardi stated that the Pope had simply replied: "I already knew".

Padre Pio appears to Luigina in Bilocation

In 1950, Luigina was given the grace to see Padre Pio. She had been making visits to the Four Major Basilicas in Rome when she repeatedly saw in front of herself a Franciscan Capuchin, but always from the back. She sensed however that there was something special about him. At the end of the pilgrimage this Capuchin appeared again and suddenly he turned towards her and it was Padre Pio; but in: bilocation!

The strong spiritual bonds between Padre Pio and Luigina have come to be known from the testimony of Fr. Tarcisio in a written statement he gave on April 17, 1982. Once Luigina felt the need to ask counsel of the holy Capuchin regarding the appearances of the Madonna to her; he attentively listened to Luigina and then he encouraged her: "When the Madonna comes, kiss her feet for me".

In 1953, Luigina was unjustly accused theft at the shop where she was employed and she lost her job and lodging. Under accusation, abandoned by everyone, and not knowing what to do she went to San Giovanni Rotondo to see Padre Pio.  Fr. Tarcisio perfectly remembers this occasion, that when he saw before himself this woman who he never saw before, he wondered to himself how it was that she was greeted as “an old friend” of Padre Pio, not realizing at that time the spiritual and mystical bond between the two. He (Padre Pio) gave her a banknote of five lire and also he gave her a closed envelope for a police officer friend who lived in her town: it contained the name of the guilty party. While afterwards she was recognized as being completely innocent, for Luigina it was a period of great sadness and mortifications.

For about twenty-five years she had to live on other people's hospitality, in exchange for her company and her domestic help, and through this she had to bear a number of bitter crosses. A friend that welcomed her in Statute Street, Maddalena Tizian, was witness to some of Luigina supernatural manifestations, to which she personally didn't want to easily accept as being authentic: "I was really the first one to fight her, to not want to believe her, and this made her suffer greatly", she said. And she once said to Luigina that for many people she (Luigina) “was a question mark".

On May 13, 1953, while she was a guest in the house of a member of the Sistine Chapel Choir, Luigina met Fr. Raffaele Preite O.S.M., who recommended to her the maximum prudence in divulging her presumed supernatural experiences. He encouraged her rather to write them down. Thus began with that the understanding that he was to be for twenty five (25) years her spiritual director, to whom she referenced with these words: ''For so many years I have begged the Lord if He wished to grant me a true spiritual guide and finally he granted it to me, when by now I didn't count on it anymore. After having obtained him I made a novena of thanksgiving. I compare myself to an unbridled horse in its gallop, untamed at the bridle. ). I place myself before the judgment of my spiritual father, who I feel to be very close to the Holy Spirit, that he know me well and reveal to me all of my faults. From now on I want to renounce my will in everything. Through him Jesus will trace the way”

A portrait of Luigina Sinapi

A religious sister that served as her nurse, Sister Gerardina Sanita, remembered that Luigina, " ... asked permission for everything from her spiritual director, who she used to teasingly call “Bear”, because he was always seemingly severe with her". Truly because she distrusted herself, she continually sought the advice and the guidance of the priest, to whom she always placed herself entirely. Many can testify that, whatever person came to her, Luigina always sent them first to her spiritual director or the priests whom she knew, and whatever decision she would make, she always passed it through their counsel in obedience to them.

In the later years of her life, Luigina Sinapi was given the great privilege of having Jesus in the Most Holy Eucharist present in the small Chapel inside her home on Urbino Street, where it was possible to celebrate daily and Sunday Mass. Her modest home became thus always more, the "center of fervid spirituality up until her death", as afterwards stated Fr. Cammarota. The authorization to have the Blessed Sacrament in her home - which was always renewed by the Vicariate of Rome—was due to Monsignor Pietro Bianchi, who had a deep respect and admiration for the piety and devotion of Luigina.

In 1970, after having lost her secretary job, Luigina continued her true work with even more fervor---she called it an "apostolate of consolation". People came to her and she deeply interested herself in other people's problems, giving and helping in every way she could, without ever asking anything in return. She had little, but her home was always open to all, without time limits she kept company with those who were suffering, and listed to their heartaches, and gave encouragement, and offering advice when necessary.

Her holy death

Concerning Luigina, Cardinal Vallini states (in part): "In her autobiographical slogan ‘A mustard seed in a furrow in Rome’, we see a clear image of the style of the life of the Servant of God: to suffer and to offer her life, in union with the sacrifice of Christ. In the spirit of the Gospel, she wanted to consider herself a small mustard seed left to fall in a furrow for the Church. Luigina, a daughter of the Church, was in service to the Church in so many ways and circumstances, with prayer, counsel, discernment, teaching, material and spiritual help, offering herself as a victim. Truly her spirituality can be synthesized in the expression "to suffer and to offer".

Luigina Sinapi died a holy death at Rome, April 17, 1978, a voluntary victim of the merciful love of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, in a holocaust for the Church and the world".

Her attending medical doctor, Dr. Mark Grassi testified that the last days were of great suffering for Luigina. Yet she was very peaceful, loving and happy. On one occasion, smiling she was overheard murmuring, "I am waiting!"

At the moment she died she was completely alone, just as Jesus had foretold her many years earlier. She was found with her face toward the tabernacle. The funeral was celebrated in the Basilica of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem in Rome, and she is buried in the cemetery Verano in Rome.

Servant of God Luigina Sinapi, pray for us!

Primary Source for this article is the book "Servant of God Luigina Sinapi" by Re. Edward J. Kelty and Rosalina Azaro Pulvirenti, 2011, Editrice Velar.

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“When I am asked to help my neighbor, may I never complain like Simon of Cyrene first did when asked to help carry the Cross of Jesus.” –Servant of God Luigina Sinapi