Bl. Imelda Labertini
It was hard to chose a Dominican saint to highlight our theme of the Eucharist. Should we pick St. Hyacinth, the apostle to Poland, who once miraculously saved the Eucharist and a statue of Our Lady from the oncoming Tartars? St. Thomas Aquinas, who composed the texts for the liturgy of Corpus Christi, including the “O Sacred Banquet” that Dominican pray before every Office in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament? Or St. Martin de Porres, who became invisible after receiving Holy Communion so he could make his Thanksgiving all day long in peace? Finally, we decided upon Bl. Imelda Lambertini, the patron saint of First Communicants, because her story highlights in simple relief two things: desire for the Eucharist, and following God’s call in the depths of one’s heart.
All the accounts we have read of Bl. Imelda speak of the great piety of her early childhood. Her parents, both devout and of the nobility, treasured her and noted her strong attraction for the things of God above ordinary childish play. We can draw from this, not simply, “Yet another child prodigy,” but a testimony to the action of grace in a heart free from distractions and attentive to God’s love. Wherever we are at in our lives, we can cooperate with His grace by working to remove distractions from our life and making space for silence and reflection so we can pay attention to His interior guidance and respond more freely to His love. In Bl. Imelda’s case, this docility and strong attraction led to her being placed by her parents in the Dominican monastery of St. Mary Magdalen, south of Bologna, when she was around nine years old.
Once in the monastery, the Eucharistic dimensions of Bl. Imelda’s story come to the fore. While she gave herself joyfully to the Dominican monastic life, as much as was appropriate or allowed for a girl of her age, her chief devotion, one biographer tells us, “was to Jesus hidden in the Sacrament of His love; and with all the ardor of her soul did she long for the happy day when our Lord would unite her to Himself in Holy Communion. ‘Tell me,’ she would often say to her religious Sisters, ‘how is it possible to receive Jesus into one's heart and not to die of joy?’”
This is, in fact, what happened. On the feast of Our Lord’s Ascension, in the year 1333, Imelda remained after Mass praying and longing to receive Our Lord, as she was still younger than the normal age for First Holy Communion at that time. Suddenly a heavenly fragrance spread through the monastery. Hurrying back to choir, the nuns saw Imelda with a radiant Host miraculously suspended in the air above her. Given this evident sign of God’s will, the chaplain gave Imelda the Host as her First Holy Communion. When the nuns returned to check on her after her Thanksgiving, they found that this ardent sacramental encounter had effected in this eleven-year-old novice the ultimate goal of Eucharistic communion for all of us: union with God in heaven. May Bl. Imelda obtain for us greater longing for Jesus in the Eucharist, so that we may be united more closely to Him here on earth as we journey towards heaven.