Taken from the Group of prayer of Father Pio Pieltrecina:
“HOW GOOD YOU ARE, JESUS! HOW GOOD YOU ARE!”
The Venerable María del Carmen González Valerio was a Spanish girl who, at just nine years old, transformed unbearable human suffering into one of the purest offerings of love in modern history.
Born in 1930, her life took a heroic turn when, following her father’s murder and in the midst of religious persecution, she decided to offer herself to God as a sacrificial soul for the salvation of those who had taken her father from her and for the conversion of the Church’s enemies.
This self-sacrifice was not merely verbal; it manifested itself in a physical ordeal that began with a simple case of scarlet fever and escalated into a clinical martyrdom difficult to imagine for a girl of her frailty. The disease progressed relentlessly, complicated by septicemia that undermined her defenses and forced her to undergo extreme surgical procedures to clear the bone infection behind her ear.
Despite the technical success of the surgery, her suffering multiplied: gangrenous sores covered her skin, and she suffered from phlebitis and severe colitis that tormented her day and night.
The extent of her deterioration was such that the bone in one of her ears was exposed, and the other—on which she leaned for relief—eventually rotted away until it fell off on its own. Amid this ordeal, Mari Carmen received more than twenty injections a day and subsisted on a bitter acorn purée, enduring fainting dismays produced by the mere touch of the sheets due to her extreme sensitivity.
Instead of complaints, her room was filled with prayer. With an inner peace that amazed doctors and nurses, Mari Carmen always repeated, “May God’s will be done.” Even in her most agonizing moments, she asked her mother to sing that melody that had accompanied her since her First Communion—a prayer set to music that summed up her absolute trust: “How good you are, Jesus! How good you are!” This refrain was her medicine against pain, the balm that allowed her to look beyond her wounds.
Shortly before she passed away, while they were cutting off some of her curls to aid healing, the little girl uttered a phrase that remained etched in memory as her own “Stations of the Cross”: “From this hair they’ve cut off to the toenail on the tip of my foot, my whole body hurts.” Without realizing it, she was quoting Isaiah’s prophecy about the Man of Sorrows, that Christ who had no healtly part from the sole of his foot to the top of his head.
Declared Venerable by John Paul II in 1996, Mari Carmen remains today an example of radical forgiveness. As we await the miracle that will raise her to the altars, we invoke her as our advocate, asking her to teach us to transform our own crosses into bridges of reconciliation
“THE VIRGIN COMES WITH THE ANGELS TO TAKE ME WITH HER"
The venerable María del Carmen had predicted several times that the Virgin would come to take her on her saint’s day, July 16. However, she later learned that her aunt Sofía was getting married that day, and, not wanting to disrupt the celebration, it is believed that she asked the Blessed Virgin to come for her the following day.
Her mother told her no, but seeing the firm conviction with which she spoke, she notified all the family members. Mari Carmen then asked her to sing the hymn from her First Communion: “How good you are, Jesus, how good you are!” Seeing her mother cry, she kissed her with a smile and said:
—“Don’t worry, Mamaíta, I’ll pray a lot for you.”
Around 1:00 p.m., the little girl curled up even more. Moments before she died, looking at all the family members surrounding her bed, she advised them:
“Love each other.”
Shortly afterward, Mari Carmen sat up in bed. She could hear singing and heavenly music.
“Mom, Mom, can’t you hear them singing? Can’t you hear how beautiful it is?”
She asked the nurse to call her grandmother, and when her grandmother arrived, she asked her:
“Can’t you hear how beautiful it is? They sing so well! Who are they?”
At first, her grandmother didn’t answer her; but since she kept insisting, she finally replied:
—“They’re the angels, Mari Carmen.”
Then, filled with joy, she added:
—“Yes, they’re the angels who have come for me!”
Spreading her little arms toward the sky, she seemed to want to brush away something in the air that was bothering her, and she said:
—“Let me go, let me go now.”
Her grandmother asked her:
—“Where do you want to go, Mari Carmen?”
And she replied, with that smile that had not left her lips all morning:
—“To heaven, Grandma!”
Since the doctor still insisted on keeping her on earth, she exclaimed:
—“Let me go, doctor, let me go now! Can’t you see that the Virgin Mary is coming with the angels to take me?”
Let’s now look at her mother’s account:
“And finally, clasping her little hands together, to everyone’s amazement, she said: ‘Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, assist me in my final agony! Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, grant that when I die, my soul may depart in peace and be with You!’” We were all amazed, for no one had spoken to her about death, or agony, or anything of the sort. Those were her last words. Sitting up slightly, as if to reach for something, she fell back onto the pillow, dead, without any agony and with no change in her expression.”
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Mari Carmen was only nine years old.
FROM THE GROUP ADVENIAT REGNUN TUUM:
At the moment when the venerable María del Carmen had just died, her body was physically ravaged and disfigured by the various illnesses and ailments that had afflicted her.
Suddenly, one of her uncles, who was watching her from the foot of the bed, exclaimed:
—“Look, look how beautiful she’s becoming!”
Everyone was entranced. Let’s look at her nurse’s testimony:
“Before she died, she was stiff and smelled bad. She had sepsis and severe colitis. No matter how much we tried to clean her, she gave off a foul odor. When she died, it was remarkable. She changed completely. She gave off a gentle scent—a fragrance emanating from her, distinct from the flowers we had placed on her. The stiffness left her. She became flexible.”
The transformation was so extraordinary that the medical examiner was initially reluctant to certify her death. He said that, given the circumstances, the girl had to be dead, but that this was not a corpse.
They dressed Mari Carmen in her white First Communion dress and laid her down among the lilies from her aunt’s wedding. Then something remarkable happened on that hot July 17. Let Dr. Blanco Soler himself recount it:
“The girl was laid on a bed of flowers. That night, I insisted that they be removed so that, once properly placed in water, they would remain fresh by the time of the burial. Her mother set many aside, but left quite a few surrounding her little face, which took on an indescribable expression as she passed away. The next morning, all the flowers that had lain with her were covered with a mysterious dew that kept them looking as if they had just been cut; in contrast, the ones we had tried to preserve had withered completely.”
Time passed, as there were difficulties arranging the burial, since Madrid was celebrating the anniversary of the National Uprising for the first time. Forty-eight hours went by, and finally, on July 19, she was laid to rest. As her doctor wrote:
“She was buried without rigor mortis, and her complexion and appearance were beautiful.”
Her face retained a delicate pink hue, surrounded by lilies that remained fresh.