Cecilia Eusepi

(Italy, 1910–1928)

The youngest of eleven children on a small farm, she was sent to a convent school at age six. In her early teens she hoped to become a missionary with the Sisters of Mary, but she was weak from tuberculosis and was sent back to her village, confined to bed.

Her confessor urged her to keep a journal, and she wrote her autobiography in a school exercise book. She called it The Story of a Clown.

She wrote: “Sometimes in my amazement I wonder what Jesus ever saw in me that was so attractive as to draw Him to my nothingness.” After all, she was devoted and prayed, but was otherwise unremarkable. She was, she wrote, “a half-stupid clown, good for nothing.”

She died at eighteen. According to an elderly farmer who lived nearby, “When she died, some people said that a saint had died. But others claimed that she was just good, a good girl who had suffered, and they criticized these others for insisting on making a saint of her.” In 2012 she was indeed made a saint.