At that time, the priest would sometimes say to her: “Rebecca, ask the Lord for health.” She did it, according to her sister. But, at a given moment, her request was much deeper and, as if she had had some revelation, she began to pray in these terms: “The Lord already knows that if it is convenient, He has to give me health. I only ask Him to increase my faith to continue trusting and abandoning myself in whatever He wants,” remembers Laura.
In those times it was not strange to hear Rebeca console the family, taking away their sufferings, like when she said: “Don’t worry, I’m the family’s lightning rod.”
During a visit by the then Bishop of Orihuela, Bishop Pablo Barrachina, Rebeca uttered a special phrase, “as if she had been waiting for there to be an ecclesiastical authority” to say it, her sister explains: “I am going to heaven and little by little I I will take the ones I love.”
Laura details that the prelate asked her to explain what she meant. She answered: “Well, I will be in heaven interceding for all those people I love. “I will be with God interceding for them.”
To understand the scope of these expressions, Laura adds that her sister “was not a verbal person. Hearing those words from her meant taking them seriously. She said it with all her conviction as if somehow God had revealed to her what he wanted from her.”
During those last months, Rebeca managed so that those who were furthest away could experience something of her heaven, despite the illness. That’s why, when they asked her when they could visit her, she called them right at the time when they were celebrating Mass at the foot of her bed. “And they did it with great pleasure, even if they were not practitioners,” Laura recalls.
“You pray to a sister safely”
How do you pray to a sister, when you have the inner certainty that she lived and died holy? The question produces a breakdown of emotion in Laura. There are many who ask him to pray to her sister for the most diverse intentions of hers. She also did it for her mother, who suffered from breast cancer two years ago.
“I ask a lot of Rebeca and I feel her with me. Regardless of whether she is my sister, she has transformed my life,” explains Laura, who, faced with the vicissitudes of each day, remembers “the virtue that my sister had in certain moments that are difficult for me and that involve an internal struggle.” ”.
Laura affirms that a sister “is prayed to safely.” And she explains it: “It’s not that I have earned heaven because I have a sister who can become a saint. I have to sanctify myself, that’s clear. But it is true that there is an open path, in which Rebeca tells me: ‘Laura, go there, the Lord wants this from you’ on a daily basis.”
“Aunt Rebeca’s Apostle”
Naturally, Rebeca’s short life also leaves its mark on her nephews, who did not get to know her, although they are not completely strangers. “With complete normality,” Laura details, they have often visited her in the cemetery.
To understand what Rebeca’s life was like and what it means that her canonization process is underway, the sisters of this Servant of God strive to convey “in a manner appropriate to her age, that her aunt died of an illness, but that she lived during his life doing good, helping others, loving Jesus and the Virgin very much, and now he is in heaven interceding for us like an angel.”
Laura has a son and a daughter. The boy recently told her: “Mom, I’m going to be Aunt Rebeca’s apostle,” as if to say that he was going to talk a lot about his aunt, whom he never met in person, but who has a picture of him in his room. .
Beyond this, the Rocamora family experiences everything that happened around Rebeca with simplicity and normality: “We try to live it with maximum humility, because in the end it is a gift that God has allowed. We are not better than anyone else and we follow our own path of sanctification,” explains Laura.
However, as reflected in the film with numerous testimonies, it is not uncommon for people in the town to remember their sister’s passage through earthly life, which left a mark when she left: the smell of holiness so often collected in the biographies of the Saints.
Nicholas de Cardenas
Born in 1980, I am a Spanish husband and father and journalist with more than 20 years of experience in print and digital media, specializing in sociopolitical and religious information. I have worked for more than 10 years in defense of human rights and have accreditations in Journalism and Comprehensive Communication. Since July 2022, I have been a correspondent for ACI Prensa and EWTN Noticias in Spain, covering international events of the Catholic Church.