Vera Grita was born in Rome on 28 January 1923. Her life was marked by different types of suffering: her family’s financial problems, which forced her to move from Rme, first to Sicily and then to Savona; the Second World War; the degenerative disease she had to face for many years.
Daughter of Hamlet Grita, a photographer by profession and Zacco Marianna della Pirrera, from a noble family, Vera was the second child of four sisters. For financial reasons, eleven-year-old Liliana had to leave the family with her younger sister to join her paternal aunts in Modica. At seventeen she joined the family as they moved to Savona and there she obtained her Teaching Certificate. However, she was forced to give up university studies to help the family financially after her father's untimely death.
During the bombing of Savona in 1944, Vera was trampled by the fleeing crowd seeking refuge in a tunnel: she was diagnosed with crushing syndrome with muscle damage that affected the entire body, damaging mainly the kidneys. For the next 25 years, Vera would face lengthy stays in hospital. Her precarious physical condition did not prevent her from winning a competition as a teacher in primary schools. She went to work in Rialto, Erli, Casanova di Varazze, Deserto di Varazze and other towns in the Ligurian hinterland, including Alpicella, a hamlet of the Municipality of Varazze, which commemorated the Servant of God in June 2023.
She was assigned to that school in October 1959 to teach first and second grade children: "We intended to form a single family" Vera writes in the class register "the first grade child (class), following the example of Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus, chooses a little sister from classmates in second class so that the older ones protect and guide the younger ones and so that they learn to love each other mutually. I asked them what name we could put on the door of the classroom and Emilia, a 2nd class student suggested ‘the school family’". And the children also began to call the school "the house of joy".
Among Vera's pupils was Fr Lorenzo Caviglia, a parish priest much loved by the entire Community of Alpicella, who died an untimely death in 2007. "I had the joy of meeting him personally 21 years ago in 2002" says Maria Rita Scrimieri, Salesian Cooperator "while I was looking for Vera's pupils to collect testimonies in view of the cause of beatification ... He remembered his teacher Vera very well, and he said that he had not forgotten her especially for one detail that as a child had attracted his attention and amazed him: during the Way of the Cross that all children did with the teacher, Vera was sometimes moved to tears."
In Alpicella, on 6 October 1959, Vera had her first mystical experience: "There is a call from Heaven: the Heaven that bends over one of her creatures to give her the greatest Grace in her sadness." Thus begins the first message that Vera received, which she wrote on a sheet of paper and kept in the secret of her heart. Vera wrote in 13 notebooks everything that Jesus communicated to her, notebooks that are kept at the Curia in Savona and that have been published in the book "Take me with you!" (Elledici, 2017).
Half of the 10th notebook, half of the 12th and all of the 13th were written at the Santa Corona di Pietra Ligure Hospital, where Vera spent several periods of hospitalisation and where she died in 1969.
Vera's life highlights how she experienced these negative events, facing them with the strength of faith in Jesus Christ, thus witnessing, in her short and suffering life, to a heroic fidelity to the crucified and risen Love. At the end of her earthly life, the Lord would repay her faithfulness by giving her the new name: Vera of Jesus. "I have given you my holy Name, and from now on you will be called and you will be ‘Vera of Jesus’" (3.12.1968).
On 14 December 2022, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints recognised the validity of the Diocesan Process of the Cause for the Beatification and Canonisation of the Servant of God Vera Grita, which closed in Savona on 15 May 2022.
