Holy See Allows Cause of Cooperator Vera Grita to Advance

Holy See Allows Cause of Salesian Cooperator Vera Grita to Advance

(ANS – Vatican City – July 1, 2021) – On May 26 the Congregation for the Causes of Saints communicated to Bishop Calogero Marino of Savona-Noli the nihil obstat from the Holy See for the opening of the cause of beatification and canonization of the Servant of God Vera Grita (1923-1969), a laywoman who was a Salesian Cooperator. The nihil obstat is the authorization by the Holy See for the opening of the diocesan inquiry after it has been shown that there is nothing in the Vatican dicasteries against the Servant of God that hinders her cause.

Vera Grita, born in Rome on January 28, 1923, was an elementary school teacher. After she was trampled by a crowd fleeing a bombing in Savona on July 4, 1944, her injuries marked her irreparably. She was 21. Despite her condition, she agreed to teach in peripheral schools in the Ligurian hinterland: Rialto, Erli, Alpicella, and Deserto di Varazze. In the Salesian parish of Mary Help of Christians in Savona, she participated in parish life. Starting in 1963, Salesian Fr. Giovanni Bocchi was her confessor; when she became a Salesian Cooperator (1967), she entrusted herself to the guidance of Fr. Gabriello Zucconi.

On September 19, 1967, a mystical experience began in which she was invited to live the joy and dignity of a daughter of God in full, in communion with the Trinity and in Eucharistic intimacy with Jesus received in Holy Communion and also present in the tabernacle. “We are the wine and water: you and I, I and you. We are one thing: I dig in you, dig, dig to build myself a temple: let me work, do not set obstacles against me.... The will of my Father is this: that I remain in you, and you in me. Together we will bear great fruit.” It was the first of the messages that make up the Work of the Living Tabernacles that Vera, who was struggling with the fear of deception, wrote in obedience to Fr. Zucconi.

Vera died on December 22, 1969. The messages explicitly refer to Don Bosco and his “Da mihi animas cetera tolle” and serve to renew in the Salesians the sense of union with God and trust in Mary Help of Christians, to give God through a tireless apostolate that cooperates in the salvation of humanity. The Work, by the will of the Lord, is entrusted in the first instance to the sons of Don Bosco for its fulfillment and diffusion in parishes, religious institutes, and the Church: “I chose the Salesians because they live with the young, but their apostolic life must be more intense, more active, more heartfelt.”

The cause for the beatification of Servant of God Vera Grita was launched on December 22, 2019, the 50th anniversary of her death, in Savona with the presentation of the Supplicatio libellus to Bishop Marino by Fr. Pierluigi Cameroni, SDB, the postulator of the Salesian Congregation.