Padre Shows Up With Romantic Prayer

This tale is a miracle if ever there was one.

Jacqueline went to medical school in Italy, and one semester after her final exams, she took off for the Italian Riviera. She was standing by her motor scooter when she was hit by a car. She believes the only reason she is alive is because a surgeon happened to be right there and he gave her emergency care until an ambulance came and took her to a small hospital in the Alps.

They didn’t think she would make it. She had extensive injuries. The nurses called the nearby monastery and asked for a monk to administer the last rites. Jacqueline was in a coma for more than a month, then there were multiple surgeries and a long, long recovery period, part in Italy, part in the States. Two years in all.

“I didn’t know what to do about school. I had lost a lot of weight, I was having memory problems, wearing a neck brace and using crutches.”

Jacqueline decided to return to Italy. First she went to the little church in the town where she had recovered. So many people there had given blood and prayed for her, she wanted to thank them.

“I was with a friend from Milan and I said to her, ‘What do I do now?”’

Her friend convinced her to see a fortune-teller, who saw a dark-haired man with a beard.

“I had occasionally dated a blond doctor, but I didn’t know anyone like that.”

The next day, back at the church, Jacqueline met Padre Alonzo, the monk who had given her the last rites. He had high blood pressure, and she said she would monitor it for him once a week.

“We kept up a correct relationship. He would call once in a while, and then he started to call once a day.” When it was time for Jacqueline to move back to the States, he helped her ship her things. She thought she heard him laughing, but he was crying.

“He said, ‘I’ve lived in a monastery since I’m 8. You are one of my few female friends and I’m going to lose you.’ I said, ‘We’ll stay in touch.”’

When Jacqueline got home, she got a call from the Padre. He said he was thinking of going to California and would it be all right if he stopped in Chicago to see her? She said of course. When she picked him up at the airport, it was the first time she had seen him without his black robe. They drove a little and he said, “Let’s pray together.”

His prayer was “Dear Lord, please bind this woman to me with a chain of love, and I promise to stay always by her side and never seek another.”

At this point, Jacqueline entered the Twilight Zone. Padre Alonzo was promising undying love? She had never thought of him as a romantic figure, but suddenly her heart was flooded with love. He said he wanted to talk to her mama. He told Mama that God had sent Jacqueline to him, and he wanted to get a dispensation and marry her. Now Mama was in the Twilight Zone, too.

“I told my mother he was a very good man, he would never divorce me, never leave me, he’d be a good husband and father. I said yes and we got married within 10 days.”

You want a happy ending, but you’re only going to get a partial one. Jacqueline and Alonzo were wonderfully happy for three years. They had a daughter they adored. Then one day, in 1981, at 38, he collapsed and died.

For years, Jacqueline kept a brief case with his private things in the closet. She couldn’t bear to open it. But her daughter, now a teenager with her first boyfriend, who was having problems with moral values and love versus lust, decided to open it. There was a tape inside. On one side was her father’s sermon on love and commitment. On the other side was Jacqueline’s favorite piece of music, Bach’s Fugue in D Minor.

They both heard exactly what they needed to hear.