Background
She was born Julia Crotta on October 15, 1907, in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the United States, to Italian immigrant parents.
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Nazarena Jesus
Edit ProfileEducation
She studied at the Hartford Conservatory, then piano, violin (with Hugo Kortschak) and composition (with David Stanley Smith and Richard Donovan) at the Yale School of Music.
Career
She matriculated from Albertus Magnus College. To discern a possible monastic vocation, Crotta joined the Carmel of Our Lady of Mountain. Carmel and Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, in Newport, Rhode Island, living there for about three months before she left, seeking a more solitary way of life.
Still in Rome, she then entered the Carmel of the Reparation in the fall of 1938, where she pronounced simple vows as a Discalced Carmelite nun.
In 1944, just before her solemn vows, however, she left Carmel. This is a practice long unique to that Order, but normally only after a number of years of living in the community.
She then took the name, Nazarena of Jesus. Nazarena was to remain in a secluded cell in that monastery, leading a strict ascetic regime, for the rest of her life, hearing Mass through a grille, and receiving her food and messages from the Mother Superior and the other nuns through a slot in the door to her cell.
She spoke to no one directly, except once a year, when she spoke to the priest who served as her spiritual director
Those meetings could last an entire day, during which she would talk for hours. Pope Paul VI visited the monastery on Ash Wednesday of 1966 (February 23 that year), and blessed Nazarena through her grille, while she wore a black veil covering her face. She died there February 7, 1990, aged 82.
