Blessed Alexandrina da Costa

Maria Rita Scrimieri was born on April 7, 1950. She has a degree in Social Sciences from the University of Trento and in Psychology from the University of Padua. She worked in the field of clinical psychology and psychotherapy, in the field of mental suffering.

Married since 1987, she shared with her husband, a psychiatrist, a passion for studying and working in the field of clinical psychopathology, in psychiatry. Maria Rita Scrimieri practiced her profession, both at a hospital and private level, in Milan, until 2005.

In the 90s, thanks to the writings of the Portuguese mystic and Salesian Cooperator, Blessed Alexandrina Maria da Costa, Maria Rita Scrimieri became closer to the world of Christian mystical experience, which also led her to a personal path of conversion and return to the Catholic faith.

Salesian Cooperator, since 1994, she published, in 1999, Come l’ape di fiore in fiore (Elledici), which deals with the work of love and repair of the abandoned Tabernacles in the life of Blessed Alexandrina. She later published The Smile on the Cross, a Way of the Cross with meditations taken from the writings of Blessed Alexandrina.

In 2001, with two Salesian priests, Fr. Mozzanica and Fr. Montagnoli, she founded, in Milan, the Study Center “Opera dei Tabernacoli Viventi”, dedicated to the Salesian Cooperator Vera Grita, spokesperson for the Opera dei Tabernacoli Viventi.

Having become a widow in 2009, Maria Rita dedicated herself to creating, in collaboration with the Portuguese Salesian Province, an International Center for spirituality and reception of pilgrims in Balasar, the birthplace of Blessed Alexandrina. In 2015, on the bicentenary of Don Bosco’s birth, the Center was partially inaugurated.

In 2017, she edited the book “Portami con te!” (Elledici), based on Vera Grita’s original notebooks, relating to the “Opera dei Tabernacoli Viventi”, and, in 2018, published the book “Vera Grita una mistica dell’Eucaristia” (Elledici), which was based on the complete Epistolary of Vera Grita and the three Salesian Priests who guided her.

Maria Rita Scrimieri is currently collaborating with the Postulation of the Causes of Saints of the Salesian Family, with a view to launching the Cause of beatification and canonization of Vera Grita in Savona, on December 22, 2019.

Her connected life currently unfolds between Italy and Portugal.