Alexandrina of Balasar: the bedridden mystic said to live without food

On Holy Saturday 1918, three girls were sewing in a house in the parish of Balasar, in the Minho, the green farming country of north-west Portugal. Alexandrina Maria da Costa was learning the trade from her older sister, Deolinda, alongside a young apprentice. Easter fell on 31 March that year, so the Saturday before it was 30 March: Alexandrina's fourteenth birthday.4 sources4 sources

Deolinda saw three men coming towards the house. One was Alexandrina's former employer, a neighbour she had worked for and later called a perfeito carrasco, a perfect tyrant. The girls shut themselves in the room. The men got into the house and tried to force the door. The former employer went through the kitchen and attacked a trapdoor into the room with a mallet, but the girls had put the sewing machine on top of it. The Vatican's biography says the men meant to rape the girls; her own autobiography, Reis and Cardoso note, does not say so directly.3 sources3 sources

When Deolinda opened the door to try to escape, Alexandrina stayed behind. As her old employer came towards her, she jumped from the window, a drop of about four metres. In the account she later dictated, she got up, picked up a stick, went back in, called the men dogs and threatened to shout for help unless they let the other girl go.3 sources3 sources

The worst effects of the fall were not immediate. Over the next seven years it left her paralysed, and the rest of her life was spent in one bed in one room. From there, in the 1940s, she became the subject of a long argument among Portuguese doctors and priests over a single claim: that for thirteen years she lived on nothing but communion.2 sources2 sources

Alexandrina was born on 30 March 1904 in Balasar, a parish of the municipality of Póvoa de Varzim in the Archdiocese of Braga, and baptised on Holy Saturday, 2 April. Balasar is about 12 kilometres inland from the coastal town of Póvoa, and today has some 2,500 inhabitants.3 sources3 sources

Her parents never married. Her father, António Gonçalves Xavier, emigrated to Brazil, a common path out of the poor rural north at the time. He came back a rich man but did not keep his promise to marry her mother, Maria Ana da Costa. Maria Ana raised Deolinda and Alexandrina alone. People in Balasar told the historian Tiago Pires Marques that the family had lived in extreme poverty.2 sources2 sources

There was little schooling. Alexandrina spent about 18 months in Póvoa de Varzim, from 1911, lodging with a cabinetmaker so she could attend primary school. Back in Balasar she worked in the fields, strong enough to be paid the same as the men. At about 12 she nearly died of an infection, perhaps typhoid, and her health never fully recovered.3 sources3 sources

After the fall the doctors who saw Alexandrina judged the damage irreversible. Until she was 19 she could still drag herself to church, where people watched her pray bent over. In 1923 a Porto doctor, João de Almeida, predicted she would be paralysed. Her own doctor later described the illness as a myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord, in the lumbar region.3 sources3 sources

On 14 April 1925, by the Vatican's and the sanctuary's dating, she took to her bed for good, looked after by her mother and Deolinda. Marques puts it in 1924, when she was 19. Until 1928 she prayed for a cure and promised to become a missionary if she were healed. Then, by her own account, she came to see suffering as her vocation and offered it for the conversion of sinners.4 sources4 sources

In the early 1930s Mariano Pinho became her spiritual director. Sources give his years with her as anything from 1932, 1933 or 1934 to 1941 or 1942. From 1934 he had her put into writing what she said Jesus told her. She did not write the texts by her own hand: they were dictated to her sister, to the village schoolteacher and to her doctor. Typed up for her beatification process, they ran to more than 4,000 pages. Marques calls them a palimpsest whose authorship is more collective than individual.4 sources4 sources

From 1936 (1935, according to Marques) she asked the Pope through Pinho to consecrate the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the Holy See questioned the Archbishop of Braga about her three times. On 31 October 1942 Pius XII made that consecration in a radio message in Portuguese heard at Fátima. The Vatican's biography of Alexandrina sets the two facts side by side without saying that one caused the other.3 sources3 sources

From Friday 3 October 1938 until March 1942, Alexandrina was said to relive the Passion of Christ every Friday, 182 times by the Vatican biography's count. In that account, though paralysed, she would get down from the bed and for about three and a half hours act out the Stations of the Cross with gestures of great pain. Visitors crowded into the room to watch, and her doctor later had the ecstasies photographed.2 sources2 sources

Church authorities were already watching her. Marques records that the Holy See sent a commission of theologians to observe her in 1937, and again in 1938, followed by Elísio de Moura, a Coimbra psychiatrist who in 1939 became the first head of the Portuguese medical association. According to Pinho's own biography of her, Moura ruled out hysteria but called the case one of fraud and autosuggestion. Pinho's answer was that the psychiatrist understood nothing of theology or mysticism.1 source1 source

In 1941 a new doctor came on the scene: Manuel Augusto Dias de Azevedo, a former seminarian with an interest in mysticism, who looked after her until she died. He found her intelligent and mentally healthy, and wrote that nothing he saw could be classed as natural or diabolical. For him, that meant the ecstasies came from God.1 source1 source

By then Pinho had stopped directing her, in 1941 by the Vatican's account. The case became public in 1942, when a priest of the Holy Ghost Fathers, a missionary order, published an account of her ecstasies. A theological quarrel followed in Catholic magazines, and medical authorities were drawn into it.2 sources2 sources

On 27 March 1942 a new claim began. From then until her death, some thirteen and a half years later, Alexandrina was said to take no food or drink except the communion wafer. Anything else, her later director and biographer Umberto Pasquale wrote, she vomited back in great pain. The Vatican's biography says that at one point she weighed 33 kilograms.3 sources3 sources

Dias de Azevedo wanted proof. He arranged for her to be admitted to the Refúgio da Paralisia Infantil, a polio clinic in Foz do Douro, Porto's seaside district, run by the neurologist Henrique Gomes de Araújo. Gomes de Araújo had published a book on hysteria in 1919, and by Azevedo's account he expected to find that the patient was deceiving the people around her.2 sources2 sources

Azevedo set two conditions: her mental faculties would be examined and the result put in writing, and she would not be forced to eat or be injected with anything against her will. The stay had no therapeutic aim. It was, Marques writes, in effect a clinical experiment to certify the fast and her sanity.1 source1 source

She was carried to Porto and watched day and night from 10 June to 20 July 1943. The stay was planned for 30 days. In her autobiography she says that one of the watchers described the case to another doctor, who said watchers were easily fooled. Gomes de Araújo told him to send someone he trusted, and he sent his own sister. Gomes de Araújo then asked Alexandrina to stay ten more days to convince the doubter. She also recalled the doctors leaving plates of steak by the bed to tempt her.2 sources2 sources

The full report was less of a certificate than devotional accounts suggest. Gomes de Araújo described her as sincere, intelligent and without a shadow of imposture, but carrying fixed, systematised ideas that determined her abstinence. Citing the French neurologist Charcot on mental anorexia in hysterical patients, he wrote that this was partly her case, but only partly, and called her a neuropath.1 source1 source

What he could not explain was the length of time without liquids and without passing urine. Medicine, he wrote, could account for much of the case, but those details called for a suspension of judgement until a clear explanation shed light on them. A second report, dated 26 July 1943 and signed by Dias de Azevedo and Carlos Lima, a professor of medicine at the University of Porto, confirmed the fast and declared her of sound mind.2 sources2 sources

Alexandrina saw the forty days as a trial passed, matching Christ's forty days of fasting in the desert. In her account perhaps 1,500 people came to see her at the end, the police were needed to keep order, and flowers were thrown onto her stretcher as she left.1 source1 source

Medical reports did not settle the matter inside the Church. The curia of the Archdiocese of Braga held its own inquiry, in which a commission of priests gave a negative verdict, and the archbishop issued a circular letter with a series of prohibitions on the case. The Vatican's biography, which does not date these steps, also says that doctors treated her in a cold and hostile way, and that members and leaders of the Church added to her suffering.1 source1 source

Some of the hardest doubters were Jesuits. According to Dias de Azevedo, Father Agostinho Veloso went to see Gomes de Araújo before the report was written, to tell him the patient was an impostor and her doctor a fanatic. In 1947 Veloso returned to the case in the Jesuit magazine Brotéria, using the psychiatric terms hysteria and “psychosis of the marvellous”.1 source1 source

Marques calls this an inversion of the positions held at the start of the century. Around 1900, republican doctors had treated mystical states as illness and Catholics had defended them. In Alexandrina's case Catholic doctors vouched for the religious character of what they saw, while some churchmen argued, in psychiatric language, that it was pathological.1 source1 source

Historians have read the case in other ways. The anthropologist João de Pina Cabral, studying the Minho, grouped the cult of women who fasted, the jejuadoras, with the cults of the souls in Purgatory and of incorrupt bodies, and mentioned Alexandrina among them. Marques sets her beside the fasting women saints studied by the historian Caroline Walker Bynum. Reis and Cardoso compare her with the “anorexic saints” described by two Brazilian authors in a psychiatry journal: women for whom eating, not fasting, was what made them ill.2 sources2 sources

Marques also found that people in Balasar saw her as a corpo aberto, an “open body”: in the region's folk healing, a person exposed to the spirits of the dead who could gain powers of divination. In her autobiography she complained that people called her a witch and asked her questions as if she could see the future. Villagers told Marques that some brought her other people's clothes so that she could cure their owners, which she rejected as humiliating.1 source1 source

In 1944 Umberto Pasquale, an Italian priest of the Salesian order, became her second director and had her keep dictating a diary, and she joined the Salesian Cooperators, the order's lay association. From 1946, at her own request, she lay on hard boards. Visitors came from far away in growing numbers to ask for advice.3 sources3 sources

She died on the evening of 13 October 1955, the anniversary of the last of the apparitions of the Virgin reported at Fátima in 1917. The record kept at her bedside by the village schoolteacher gives the time as 8.29; the Vatican's biography says 7.30. Earlier that evening she had said: “I am going to heaven.”3 sources3 sources

An account quoted by Pasquale says people filed past her body from one in the afternoon until ten the next morning, medical professors and lawyers among the farm families. She was buried in a plain grave, turned towards the tabernacle of her church as she had asked. On 14 July 1948 she had written her own epitaph.2 sources2 sources

The Archdiocese of Braga opened the diocesan process for her beatification on 14 January 1967. Its tribunal heard 46 witnesses before the process closed on 10 April 1973 and the papers went to Rome. Her remains were moved from a chapel-tomb in the cemetery into the parish church on 18 July 1978. On 12 January 1996 the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, having recognised that she lived the Christian virtues to a heroic degree, declared her Venerable.2 sources2 sources

Her beatification rested on a healing: the recovery of Maria Madalena Azevedo Gomes Fonseca, a woman from the Vila Nova de Famalicão area who had emigrated to France and had been ill since 1983 with a condition later diagnosed as Parkinson's disease. She had met Alexandrina in person around 1951. On 3 March 1995, at the end of a novena to her, she said she felt suddenly well. According to the sanctuary, her doctors could find no clinical explanation, two neurologists who examined her for a Braga tribunal set up in 2002 found no sign of Parkinson's, and the Holy See's doctors judged the cure inexplicable. A decree of 20 December 2003 cleared the way for beatification.2 sources2 sources

John Paul II beatified Alexandrina in St Peter's Square on 25 April 2004, with five others, before about a thousand Portuguese pilgrims. His homily repeated the claim that the Eucharist had been “her only source of nourishment for the final 13 years of her life”. As of October 2026 she is a Blessed, not a saint.3 sources3 sources

Balasar is now a place of pilgrimage. Researchers who followed events there through 2024 found her house open to visitors, its rooms kept behind glass doors or ropes, including the sewing room with the window she jumped from. Below the window a section of the garden is called the School of Suffering. Shops sell relics and souvenirs, and a display of ex-votos, including wedding dresses, is renewed each year for the feast of her beatification on 25 April.1 source1 source

The cult has outgrown the parish church. The archdiocese and the Fundação Alexandrina de Balasar have built a new Eucharistic sanctuary, and from 10 October 2026 all worship in her honour moved there, while the old church went back to serving the parish. Their programme set the transfer of her remains to the sanctuary for that day and its dedication by the papal nuncio for the next. On the evening of 12 October, the eve of the anniversary of her death, hundreds walked by candlelight from her house to the new building.5 sources5 sources

Beatification does not oblige Catholics to believe in her fast or her visions. The Church's approval of a private revelation means only that it contains nothing against faith and morals, as the sanctuary itself reminds pilgrims, quoting Benedict XVI. What Rome examined was her writings, her virtues and one healing. The fast remains a claim, accepted by her devotees and by the Pope who beatified her, doubted by some of the clergy who studied the case in her lifetime, and at odds with what medicine knows about survival without water.5 sources5 sources

For historians the case shows how much of a saint's life is made by others. Marques reads Alexandrina's story as the work of a poor rural community, of Jesuit and Salesian directors, and of doctors who brought clinical tests and photographs into a devotion that had looked medieval. Her words reached the world through the people who wrote them down.1 source1 source