Edvige Carboni

(Italy, 1880–1952)

On the day she was born, her mother had a vision of a luminous host in a monstrance. A few days later, the baby developed a lump on her chest in the form of a cross. At five she took a vow of chastity, which she repeated daily for the rest of her life. Friends reported that, as a child, when she prayed her room would be filled with a blinding light, in which could be seen the figures of saints and angels.

To help her mother, who was ill, she left school after third grade. Sent out at night to buy food, her guardian angel would accompany her and wait outside the store, so she would not be afraid. At fifteen, she wanted to become a nun, but she had to care for her large family.

Nevertheless, Jesus chose her to be a victim soul, as St. John Bosco himself told her in a vision, “to repair for so many offenses that He constantly receives, especially because of immodest fashion, and for there to be peace among nations.” The Virgin Mary told her, “My daughter, promise me to suffer all tribulation, rejection, scorn, and sufferings for the conversion of communists.” St. John Bosco appeared again in 1941 and said: “My little daughter, remember that you have offered yourself as victim for the liberation of poor Russians from Bolshevism, sworn enemy to God. Pray so that soon the Crucified One can enter Russia.”

An angel placed a crown of thorns on her head and for a few days she could not open her eyes. She received the transverberation: An angel wounded her heart, and one could see the skin over it blistered, radiating an intense heat; her night shirts had burn marks on them. She received the stigmata, but she asked Jesus to remove it so that she could continue working. She levitated while in prayer.

The devil tormented her. He scratched her, threw stones at her head, kicked her legs so hard she could barely walk, even took the gold fillings from her teeth. He broke dishes, mirrors, and windows, and scattered her flour, pasta, and polenta on the floor. He poured water on her bed (but the Virgin Mary herself dried it out). He undid her knitting. Once, she wrote, he “grabbed my bag and took the 100 liras that I had to go shopping. He took the money and turned it into ashes.”

But her guardian angel helped her. Although she was barely literate, he dictated the letters she wrote, some of them in Latin. He made the beds when she was ill and cooked for her. One day, Jesus came to help with the laundry. She said he only pretended to wash the clothes, but had not touched them. He commanded it and the clothes became white and folded.

During the Second World War, the Virgin Mary came to her, weeping. She explained: “I am crying because I cannot appease the anger of my Son against the human race. If men don’t do penance, the war will not end and much blood will be spilled. My daughter, immodest fashions and dishonesty have enraged God.”

Soldiers who died in the war—one of them a Russian—came to her and asked her to pray for them. A teacher who was killed in a bombing told her that she only needed one more mass to be liberated from Purgatory. A priest who gave lectures at the University of Rome denying the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and for whom she used to pray forgiveness, came to her after his death. He told her that he had been condemned because of the books he had written against the faith. To prove that this vision was not her imagination, he picked up a book in her room and it burst into flames.

In August 1941, Jesus took her to visit heaven. She wrote:

I went walking up to a beautiful gate which had two angels, one on each side guarding it. The gate had a sign which read “Those who are dishonest and immodest cannot enter.” The angels made me enter. I happily entered. It was a piece of Heaven. How beautiful! Plants and flowers I had never been seen before. The floor was covered with pearls and precious flowers. . . and everyone was singing happily.

During the war, when things were scarce, Jesus gave her some shoes and a skirt, St. John Bosco brought her half a kilo of rice, and St. Dominic Savio brought her coffee.

She had the gift of bilocation. She traveled with St. Sebastian to a town far away in Italy where a man was about to commit suicide. In another town, she persuaded a dying man to accept the last rites. During the war, she twice visited Cardinal Mindszenty in prison in Hungary. Jesus took her to visit Monsignor Cuthbert O’Gara, Passionist Bishop of Nanking, who had been imprisoned by the communists in China. As she hovered above them, out of reach, the guards screamed: “She is the witch of the Pope! She is a witch!”

She went to Moscow during the war and entered Stalin’s room in the Kremlin. She said he had such an ugly stare that it made you afraid to look at him, and that he was shaking his fist, saying: “I am the strong and terrible enemy of God.” She told him: “You have to convert. But if you want to be God’s eternal enemy, you will be.” But he responded: “I will never convert. I will be God’s enemy forever.”

She wrote in her diary:

While I was praying in front of the Crucifix, a person appeared to me suddenly all in flames, and I heard a voice say: “I am Benito Mussolini. The Lord has allowed me to come to you in order to get some relief from my sufferings in Purgatory. I beg you as an act of charity to offer for me all your prayers, sufferings, and humiliations for two years, if your director allows it. God’s mercy is infinite but so is His justice. One cannot enter Heaven until one has paid the last penny of the debt owed to Divine Justice. Purgatory is terrible for me because I waited until the last moment to repent.”

Some years later she wrote:

On a spring days in 1951, Jesus told me after Holy Communion: “This morning the soul of Benito Mussolini has entered into Heaven.”

She died in 1952. In 1968, the process toward her beatification began with an investigation by the Diocese of Rome. In 1994, Pope John Paul II named her a Servant of God and the case was turned over to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. They ruled nihil obstat (“nothing against”). In 2017, Pope Francis named her as Venerable, and in 2018 he approved a miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable Servant of God, Edvige Carboni, the final step before beatification.