Blessed Camilla Battista Varano

"God willed, in His mercy, that my eyes, blinded by the deep darkness of the world, should finally open to the light of truth. Father Franci s of Urbino, whom I would Le Père François d'Urbino Preacher whose sermons prompted the saint's conversion. dare to call the trumpet of the Holy Spirit, but whom heaven has snatched from the earth, came to preach the Lenten season i Camerino Place where Bernard pronounced his religious vows. n Camerino. I followed him assiduously, and it was not without profit; for his words were like so many fiery darts that pierced my soul. His entire station revolved around these words, which he made resound, at intervals, like so many claps of thunder: 'Fear God, fear God.' Now, I conceived this holy fear so strongly: I perceived so clearly the magnitude of the offenses I had committed against His Majesty, and I experienced such a vivid terror of the eternal flames that, had I not known that despair displeases the Lord more than other sins, I truly believe I would have despaired of His mercy."

Blessed Varani fasted on bread and water three times a week, cruelly scourged each of the members of her body, and rose at night to say the rosary. As the love of suffering grew in her heart, she reduced herself on Fridays to taking only three or four morsels of bread and a little water. At night she slept on the hard ground, and by day she meditated almost incessantly.

"In this life of prayer," she says, "into which fear had led me, I began to hear, at intervals, a voice that was unknown to me, a voice that seemed to come from afar, yet not so far that its words were not very intelligible; it told me that if I wished to avoid the pains of hell, of which I was so afraid, I must renounce the world and become a nun. My spirit, at the same time, was enlightened by a celestial light, which made me see clearly that, if I did not leave the world, my ruin was certain. Now, these words were very bitter to me, and this light unbearable, because I had not yet shaken off the chains of my bad nature; and accustomed to the pleasures of the world, I found it difficult to renounce them. I could allege to myself the strongest and most persuasive reasons, but they made no impression on me, because of those disordered affections, from which one must be free to obey the movement of such an inspiration.

"When I went to prayer, it seemed to me that I was going to war, and I was not mistaken; for I fought there unceasingly against God; and there is no war as painful as that one. However, I never interrupted the course of my ordinary prayers. It happened sometimes that, tired of my resistance to His grace, the Lord would say to me: 'I am the one you desire; and yet the more I call you, the more you turn a deaf ear; the more I press you, the more you resist my love for you. Well, my daughter, go into the world where your folly leads you; go beg for its miserable affections: I only warn you that you will not find there the satisfaction of your desires.' One day, among others, when He had spoken this language to me, I meditated for a long time on His words, turning them over and over in my mind, but with an unbearable malaise of heart, because I could not resolve to enter religious life. Nevertheless, instead of leaving prayer, I gave it double the usual time, not out of devotion, but because it was a Friday, and I was accustomed to prolonging my meditation on that day. Never had I yet experienced such a clash of contrary thoughts, sometimes wanting to obey grace, and sometimes no longer wanting to. The combat became so harsh that my body was drenched in sweat. But then my free will, which in the midst of this conflict had remained neutral and free of itself, set itself up as judge, and of its own motion pronounced against me in favor of the spirit of God. The submission was prompt. I determined, with all the affection of my soul, to serve the Lord as He wished; ready, if necessary, to suffer martyrdom, rather than to resist His grace any longer, or even to oppose Him with guilty delays. I felt at the same time a vivid desire to go to Urbino, something telling me inwardly that it would only be there that I could serve God with a tranquil heart. This determination was to my soul, exhausted by such painful agitat ions, Urbino Territory and city where the saint studied. what a bed of moss strewn with flowers would be to a body overwhelmed by fatigue."

Wishing to increase the splendor of his house through a wealthy alliance, the Prince of Camerino omitted nothing to force his daughter to choose marriage; but he failed in his design. "I yield to the Lord," he finally said to his daughter, "whose vengeance I fear. The fear alone of drawing His scourges upon me forces me to grant you your freedom. Without it, you would never have obtained my consent to become a nun."

It was in the month of November of the year 1481. The Blessed one left for Urbino and took the habit of Saint Clare in the convent of that city, where several members of her family had already retired.

After two years, Giulio Cesare Varani, wishing to bring his daughter back to Camerino, had a monastery built in that city for the nuns of Saint Clare. It was into this convent that Baptista entered, with seven othe r nuns o Baptiste Italian Poor Clare nun and mystic of the 15th century. f Saint Clare, on January 4 of the year 1484.

Blessed Varani was raised to the highest degree of contemplation. We shall let her once again set forth one of her revelations herself, the most remarkable one: she speaks here in the third person.

"There was a devout soul, greatly famished for the nourishment provided by the Passion of the most loving and most sweet Jesus, who, after a great number of years spent in her spiritual reform, was finally admitted, by an admirable favor, to the communication of the interior sorrows of the afflicted heart of this God-Man.

"One day, therefore, when this devout soul was in prayer, she said to Him with anxiety of heart: — Let yourself be moved, Lord, and introduce me into the sacred bed of your interior sorrows. — Since you are ignorant, my daughter, this good Master replied to her, of the greatness of my sorrows, I will tell you that they were as great as the love I bore to my Father and to poor humans. — The devout soul replied: O my God! I cannot be content with this general knowledge; please make known to me each of the sorrows that overwhelmed your sacred heart.

"Jesus answered her with that sweetness which makes Him so lovable: — Know, my daughter, that the sorrows I bore in my heart were innumerable and infinite: it will be easy for you to understand this if you pay attention to the fact that I am the head of a body of which all Christians are the members; members which are innumerable, as you see, and most of whom were, are, and will be torn from me by mortal sin.

First sorrow. — "This sorrow was for my heart one of the most cruel and most sensitive. Imagine, in fact, what is the torture of a criminal from whom one tears limbs by violence, and you will know what my martyrdom was, at the deeply felt thought of so many souls who are torn from me forever, and of so many others who separate themselves from me for a time, and cause me as many lacerations as they commit mortal faults. Now, you must know that the pain caused by the abscission of a spiritual member outweighs that of a bodily member as much as the soul is superior to matter. You cannot understand, neither you nor anyone, how great this superiority is; I alone know how to appreciate the nobility of the soul and the baseness of the body, because it is I who made both. You cannot, therefore, understand, neither you nor anyone, the atrocity and bitterness of the sorrow of which I speak; a sorrow, however, so often renewed that its number is incalculable. To speak here only of the damned, as many lost souls, as many members torn from my body, with the pains that it is easy for you to imagine. I must say, however, that these separations were not all equally cruel to me. As mortal sins are not all equal among themselves; as there are various ways of committing them, the separations they operate caused me more or less painful lacerations. And, to say it in passing, from there come the diversities that one notices in hell, in the quality and quantity of the torments that one endures there. And because their will will remain eternally perverse, their torments also will be eternal. Oh! how this sad thought that these innumerable members were torn from me without return was unbearable to me! Also, this fatal 'never' is what torments and will torment these reprobate souls most eternally: all their other evils are nothing in comparison to this despairing thought.

"In the overwhelming pain that this fatal 'never' caused me, I would have willingly consented to suffer again all these cruel separations with their diverse lacerations, not just once, but an infinity of times, to recover a single one of these souls, and to see it reunited to the integrity of my vital members; I mean, to my elect, who will preserve eternally the life they hold from me. It is I, in fact, who am the vital life, that is to say, the life of all beings who enjoy this great benefit. You can judge by all that I have just said, by the dispositions of my heart that I have just manifested to you, how dear human souls are to me. Note well this confidence, and never lose the memory of it. You must also know that this painful 'never' so afflicts the lost souls by an effect of my justice that there is not a single one who would not want to suffer a thousand hells at once to recover the hope of being reunited to me at some time; but, alas! their sad separation is without return; and, I repeat, that is the most frightful of their torments. There, my daughter, is what the first interior sorrow was, which did not cease, from my conception until my death, to tear my heart.

— "After this discourse, the nun to whom this good Jesus addressed it experienced a lively desire, the source of which she had no trouble guessing, to propose a certain doubt to Him. Consequently, she dared to say to Him, not without respect and fear, but nevertheless with confidence and simplicity: O lovable and afflicted Jesus! I have often heard it said that you had endured all the pains of the damned; but, on this subject, I would like to know, provided, however, that this curiosity cannot displease you, if you felt the diverse sentiments that cold, heat, the action of fire, the gnashing of teeth, and the other tortures to which they are condemned operate in these unhappy souls? Tell me then, my Jesus, if you made the discernment of all these painful sensations? This interrogation did not seem to displease Him, and, in a gracious voice, He made the following reply: — I did not feel, my daughter, the diversity of the torments that the damned suffer, in the way that you understand it; that could not even be, since it is a question of dead members separated from me who am their head. I will explain my thought to you by the following comparison: If one of your limbs were devoured by some atrocious pain, you would feel it vividly until the surgeon had cut it from your body; but this cutting once done, one could cut or tear it, submit it to the action of fire or ice, without your soul experiencing the sentiment of these diverse torments; because sentiment supposes the union which would no longer exist between this part of your body and the soul that animates it; however, you would not be insensitive to these diverse treatments done to a limb that was yours, and the more one would torment it, the more, undoubtedly, your heart would be sensitive to it. Now make the application of this figure for me, and you will understand what happened in my heart with regard to the reprobate. When mortal sin tore them from my body, the pain was terrible, and because they preserved as long as they lived the power to reunite with me, I felt all their evils and shared all their pains; but since their death made this reunion impossible, I was delivered from this painful sentiment; I experienced, however, another ineffable and incomprehensible sorrow, considering that they had been my true and proper members, and that nevertheless they had fallen under the power of the infernal spirits, who made them excessively unhappy.

**Second sorrow.** — "Another pain, which pierced my heart, was caused to me by my elect themselves; for you must know that all those among them who have sinned or will sin mortally have done me the same harm, by their separation, as those who fell to the bottom of the abyss, since these are as many members that this cruel sin tore from my body. The greater was the love I bore them, which was to extend until the ages of ages, as well as that which was to unite them eternally to me, the more I was afflicted to see them leave me to attach themselves to the vilest and most contemptible objects. Also, I can say that the pain I felt in all these members caused me the most cruel lacerations. I suffered, in fact, much more in them than in the reprobate, because, besides the laceration that their separation from my body caused me when they made themselves guilty of mortal faults, I habitually felt and shared all their evils; I felt all the torments of the martyrs, all the mortifications of the penitents, all the tribulations of those who were tempted, all the sufferings of those who were sick. I shared their persecutions, their infamies, their labors, their dangers, their fatigues; in a word, all the afflictions, small and great, with which they were overwhelmed. Do you now want, my daughter, to have an idea of these pains? suppose that you had a thousand eyes, a thousand feet, a thousand hands, and so on for your other members, and that all were tortured at once by means as atrocious as they are varied, would this torture not seem intolerable to you? Well! my daughter, my members are not counted by thousands and millions; they are innumerable: it is likewise impossible to count the pains of the martyrs, confessors, virgins, and all the other elect: it goes almost to infinity. Conclude, therefore, that as no one is capable of enumerating so many sufferings, no one also can understand the pain they caused my divine heart.

— "But my heart did not limit itself to feeling all these afflictions of their life, it felt equally the diversity and multiplicity of the torments that remain for them to undergo in purgatory, according to the quality and number of their sins: for these souls are not dead members separated from my body, like those of the damned; they are my living members, spiritually united to me, and of which I consequently endure all the sufferings. That is, my daughter, my answer to your question. You asked me what sentiment I had of all these pains. I answered you that I did not feel the sufferings of the reprobate, but indeed those of my elect. For the rest, there is no difference between the pains of hell and those of purgatory, except that the former will last forever, while the latter will last only for a time; and that the inhabitants of hell are reduced to despair, while the souls of purgatory remain resigned and content, suffer in peace, and render thanks to the justice of God. But that is enough on this sorrow.

**Third sorrow.** — "This lovable Savior, continuing his account, added: — Listen, listen, my daughter; I have not yet said everything you wish to know. It remains for me to tell you of other sorrows that were also very bitter to me. What a sharp sword pierced my heart every time I thought of the pain that my sufferings and my death were to cause my pure and innocent Mother! for no one counted as painfully as she did the torture of her Son...

LIVES OF THE SAINTS. — VOLUME VI. 26

Fourth sorrow. — "Jesus changed the subject and said: — If you knew, my daughter, how much my heart had yet to suffer from the affliction of my beloved disciple, the tender Mary Magdalene! But it is a mystery that you cannot understand, nor can anyone, because it is our mutual love that served as the principle and solid foundation for all the spiritual loves of the saints. Those who have the active and passive experience of holy and spiritual love can well have some idea of the perfection of Magdalene's love for me; but in practice, no one could attain it.

Fifth sorrow. — "Another pain that tore my soul was the fixed and continuous thought of what was to happen to my Apostles at the time of my Passion and death. I saw them shaken, I saw them fall, they who were the columns of heaven and the foundations of my militant Church. I saw them dispersed like sheep that no longer have a shepherd; I thought of all they would have to suffer for love of me; I contemplated in advance their torments and their martyrdoms. Now, you must know, my daughter, that never has a father had for his children, nor a brother for his brothers, nor a master for his disciples, a love as tender and as cordial as that which I bore to these disciples, to these brothers, to these cherished children. Also, the pain that all my foreknowledge regarding them caused me was overwhelming; you can judge by this single fact. You know, my daughter, that in my agony, in the Garden of Olives, I cried out: My soul is sorrowful even unto death. Now, what caused this bitter sadness in me was less the consideration of my own evils than that of these beings who were so dear to me. I saw them without me, that is to say, without a leader, without a master, and without a father; and this abandonment was so painful to me that it seemed to me another death. Whoever wishes to read the last discourse that I addressed to them after the Last Supper will not be able, however hard he may be, to hold back his tears, because all the words that compose this discourse breathe compassion. And it could not be otherwise; for they came from the bottom of my heart, which seemed to me to be splitting with love for these dear friends.

"It was not with a confused view that I perceived their cruel martyrdoms from afar. I saw Peter crucified, Paul beheaded, Bartholomew flayed, James thrown from a terrace of the temple; I saw, finally, by what kind of death each of them was to end his life. Judge by that of the pain I experienced in my soul. If you were closely united to some person by the bonds of a holy love, and you saw her insulted, tortured, punished for you, how desolate you would be to be the occasion of her sufferings! Yes, your desolation would be all the more bitter as you would want, on the contrary, to be able to procure for her all sorts of goods, honors, and consolations. Now, it was I, my daughter, who was to be the cause of the misfortunes of my Apostles; what more is needed to initiate you into the secret of my sorrow, and to make you understand how much it is worthy of your compassion?

Sixth sorrow. — "Here is another that was no less sensitive to me: it was the betrayal of Judas, who, after having been my disciple, became my murderer. Oh! my daughter, a sharp and poisoned sword, which one would have plunged and turned continuously in my heart, would not have made me suffer more than this tearing foreknowledge. Was there ever ingratitude blacker than his toward me? After having forgiven him all his sins, I chose him for one of my Apostles. He ate with me, lodged under the same roof, and was admitted to my familiarity. I entrusted to him the power of miracles, and made him the dispenser of the gifts that were offered to me by those who bore me some interest. When I saw the design to betray me form in his heart, I redoubled the proofs of my tenderness to turn him away from this criminal thought; but I did so in vain, nothing could touch his wicked heart. On the contrary, the more I showed him attachment, the more he strengthened himself in his perfidious resolution. Finally, came the supper, where I performed this humiliating and lamentable ceremony of the washing of the feet. When his turn had arrived, I humbled myself before him as I had done before the others; but my heart could take no more. I wept bitterly and watered the feet of this wretch with my tears. What made me weep is that I said interiorly: O Judas! what have I done to you that you treat me in such a perfidious manner? O unfortunate disciple! is this then the last proof that I will give you of my love! O son of perdition, am I not your Father and your Master? why then do you want to abandon me? O Judas, if you desire thirty deniers, why do you not go and ask them from my mother who is also yours; her heart is so perfect that she would sell herself to spare you a crime and save my life. Ah! Judas, ungrateful and insensitive disciple, I wash your feet today and kiss them with so much love, and you are going to kiss me in a few hours to deliver me to my enemies. O my dear and beloved son, what a return for a father who weeps for your loss with more pain than his passion and death, because it is to save you that he came into this world!

"While my heart spoke thus, my tears watered his feet; but he did not notice it, because I was on my knees before him, my head inclined, and my long hair falling over my face prevented him from noticing that I was all in tears. But John, my beloved disciple, to whom I had entrusted all the mysteries of my passion, during this painful supper, observed my sorrow, saw my tears flowing on the feet of the traitor, and understood very well that they came from my tender love for this wretch. When a father, in fact, seeing that his son is dying, hastens to serve him, it is with an extraordinary effusion of love, and he can hardly help saying in his heart: Farewell, my son, here is the last service it will be given to me to render you. It is thus that I acted with this unfortunate one whom I knew to be on the eve of dying eternally. This testimony of love that I gave him was to be the last, since his despair was soon going to ravish him from my tenderness. That Jean Appears with the Virgin to instruct Gregory. is why I caressed his feet in a way, and kissed them with a tender compassion. Now, John, who was spying, with his eagle eye, all my actions and all my gestures, was more dead than alive seeing me treat my greatest enemy with so much kindness. When I approached him last, for his humility had made him take the last place, seeing that I was inclining to wash his feet, he could no longer contain himself. Scarcely had I bent my knees than he took me in his arms, where he held me embraced for quite a long time, weeping, sobbing, and saying to me in his heart, without uttering any external word: O my Father! o my dear Master! o my beloved brother! o my Lord and my God! how did you have the courage to wash and kiss, with your sacred mouth, the cursed feet of this infamous traitor? O my Jesus! what a perfect example of charity you leave us as an inheritance! but how will we follow it when we no longer have you, you who are all our good? Ah! this humility kills me. And your divine Mother, what will become of her when I tell her what you have just done? I fear very much that she cannot hear it without dying. O my dear Master! I can take no more; spare me the service that your humility wants to render me. Assuredly my heart is going to split if I see you wash my filthy feet, and apply your sacred mouth to these objects so contemptible. O my God! each new proof of your love only serves to increase my inconsolable sorrow. After these words and several others similar, imprinted with a sensitivity capable of softening a heart of stone, he nevertheless took off his shoes out of obedience, and blushing, presented his feet to me to be washed. I have told you all this, my daughter, so that you may know how much my heart had to suffer in this circumstance, from a disciple who seemed to take it upon himself to show me all the more hatred the more I showed him love. Judge, by seeing the sorrow of John, what mine must have been at the sight of such black ingratitude, of such monstrous insensitivity".

Seventh sorrow. — "The obstinate hatred of the Jewish people was also for my heart an intolerable torture, and you will understand it easily if you pay attention to the ingratitude it supposed. I had made the Jews a holy people, a priestly people. I had chosen them from among all the peoples of the universe, for the portion of my inheritance... After that, I certainly had the right to hope for some return on their part. What was then my sorrow, when I heard them cry with an incredible rage: We do not want this man, crucify him and give us Barabbas..."

When the Blessed wrote these things, she had been a religious for eighteen years, and the 15th century was coming to an end. We know of her spiritual life in religion only what she deemed appropriate to say. The last twenty-three years of her life are unknown to us: we only know that she was chosen by Pope Julius II to found a monastery pape Jules II Pope and member of the League of Cambrai. of her Order in Fermo; that she returned after Fermo City where Bernard exercised his ministry among the sick. a year to Camerino, where her companions elected her abbess, and that she protected the establishment of the Capuchin reform.

It is believed that our Blessed one died on May 31 of the year 1527, in the sixty-ninth year of her age. There is no doubt that her death was as holy as her life had been. The reader will have proof of this in what follows; but we cannot speak in any detail about this event, because no one, to our knowledge, took care to preserve the memory of it.

Her nuns gave her burial in their choir, in order to have a memorial always present of their beloved mother, and a visible pledge of the protection they hoped to obtain from her maternal tenderness. Thirty years after this burial, the nuns, unable to bear any longer that her precious body should remain buried in the bosom of the earth, exhumed it with great respect. What was their joy when they found it in a perfect state of preservation, the eyes shining like those of a living person, the face rosy and smiling, as if it were very glad to see them again. They wanted to keep this holy deposit in an open place, where they could go to pay their respects; but we do not know why the confessor opposed it, and wanted it to be buried again; he even demanded, with an obstinacy to which they had to yield, a mode of burial as strange as it was inappropriate. He first had the holy body placed between two boards, and ordered it to be put back into the pit from which it had been taken. Then he had it filled with earth, and after having a large quantity of water poured into it, he demanded that his companion trample it underfoot until it was level with the ground.

The very exact obedience that these holy daughters professed did not allow any of them to oppose a word to the strange zeal of this religious, much less to remove the holy body from the pit where he had had it placed. It remained there until the year 1593, when the need to bury another body in the place that hers occupied forced the nuns to open her grave again. Then the elders, who knew the precise spot, recommended to the workers to dig with all possible precautions; which they did. When they had reached a certain depth, they found a board; and as soon as they moved it, a very sweet odor did not allow them to doubt that it was the board that covered the holy body. At this news, all the nuns ran; and as soon as they smelled this perfume, they were transported with joy, and shed abundant tears, unable to doubt that this heavenly odor was a sign of the glory that their blessed mother enjoyed in heaven. Another circumstance further increased their admiration and their sweet belief: it is that while her flesh was reduced to dust, in accordance with the desire she had expressed to God some time before her death, her tongue alone had remained fresh, soft, and rosy.

The confessor, Brother Evangelista of Fabriano, who was present, moved to tears at the sight of this miraculous preservation, testified to his admiration with the words of Saint Bonavent ure in a similar case: "O precious ton sa langue seule était demeurée fraîche Miraculously preserved relic of the saint. gue, which has always blessed the Lord, and taught others to bless Him, it appears well now that your services have been pleasing to His holy Majesty!" When the nuns had satisfied their tender devotion, they deposited the holy body in a marble tomb, which they had had built in advance in their choir; but the tongue was reserved and placed in a reliquary, where it is still seen today.

Baptista was never formally beatified, but it is believed that Clemen t X autho Clément X Pope who extended the cult of Saint Gonsalo to the entire Dominican Order. rized the cult rendered to her in Camerino; and all the authors who have written about her, since the beginning of the 17th century, give her the title of Blessed, which we give her after them. She is honored on June 2 in the Order of Saint Francis. — As she contributed much, as did her family, to the reform of the Capuchins, the Franciscans have placed her in their martyrology and celebrate her feast day today.

Spiritual Life of the Blessed Varani, by Abbé P... — Cf. Lives of the Saints, by Abbé Dazas, Vivès ed., 1864.