Religious of Jesus and Mary

Dina continues on an upward path. She grows in intimacy with Jesus, she identifies with him. She still hears the voice which, since she was small, she had heard interiorly, often not only during prayer, but when working or even during times of recreation. As always, nobody noticed anything outwardly. Dina joins in with her companions, enjoys herself with them and interiorly Our Lord communicates with her.  Her confidence in Jesus dominates her life more and more and sometimes she takes the liberty of telling him mad things, yes mad ones. Is it not true that when two people love other very much, they cannot find the right words to express this love? And more and more Jesus becomes the “life of her life”; one day she hears him say: “I am who works in you and through you. From now on I shall call you Jesus, but, when you do something stupid, this will come from you and I will call you Cecilia”. And do you know what? Dina becomes aware of her fickleness and then she hears a voice which says: “Cecilia has done this”.  Jesus begins to take her place and this ever growing substitution demonstrates what St Paul says “It is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me”.

Her love of the Eucharist, which had filled  her the day of her First Holy Communion grows.  One day, at the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in the noviciate chapel, she seemed to see a crowd of people rushing towards their perdition. Jesus tells her that she can save them by praying for them and offering up small sacrifices. As a true apostle she does so immediately and sees how grace prevails and those who were running to their perdition, abandon that path. Many times she feels a burning desire to save souls and a great responsibility for them, something that she will retain throughout her life. She cannot shut herself up in her inner life; she needs to make space for other people. Frequently Dina repeats: “My God, I ask you for the grace to live and die a martyr of love, a victim of love, an apostle of love”.  In June 1923 her motto becomes “To love and to suffer”. Everything within her is a constant and rapid ascent. Her love and her desire to unite herself to God are so intense that, with St Teresa, she can say “I die because I do not die”…

As the days pass the desire to belong radically to Jesus, to give herself totally to him through the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity grows continually within Dina. Already eighteen months have passed since she entered the noviciate and eventually the long awaited 15^th August arrived.  Her parents are present and one of her cousins celebrates the Mass. The priest who had been her spiritual director for half her life was also there. Dina pronounces, in public, the vows that she had already offered privately to the Lord. Bernadette, her friend from New York, made profession the same day. Dina is now a Religious of Jesus and Mary in the Congregation founded by Claudine Thévenet in Lyon, France.

Before leaving the noviciate she expresses her feelings in a poem, it is the ideal which pursues her “Jesus, I will be a saint”.