Little Nellie Prayer cards

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Some parallels between two little girls who probably couldn’t tell the time, yet who stormed eternity, and took it

This is the story of two young Catholic children of the 20th century who reached great heights of holiness despite dying in their first decade. Jacinta Marto is well known as one of the visionaries of Fatima. Less well known is Nellie Organ (Little Nellie of Holy God) from the south of Ireland who, despite the fact that she was only four years old when she died, had already been confirmed and was confessing and receiving Communion.

In this book the author compares and contrasts the lives of these two children. A deep faith, humility, devotion to the Holy Father and love of the Eucharist were among their greatest virtues. Many were the secrets revealed to them which are hidden from the wise and learned. Reading this book will help us to understand how children of all ages can become holy. The famous Irish Monstrance on the front cover - a gift from the people of Ireland to the Shrine at Fatima in 1949 - not only signifies the great bond of Eucharistic love between these two souls, but also the strong links between the Irish people and the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal.

© Leo Madigan 2001 - 70 pages - ISBN. 9529627.4.8 - 6 B&W illustrations - 21cm x 14.5cm

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Extracts from the text:

Little Nellie receiving First Holy Communion

The godless man can understand this and croon away with the most intense of lovers. But he cannot apply it to God, the very source, nourishment and object of love, because he has rerouted his capacity to respond to love and directed it towards himself. Anything outside himself becomes an intrusion. A minute or two in the burning desert, or the first suggestion of an incline on the highest mountain and he’s back home with familiar old self. “Finding you” might be all right in theory, but it can’t compare with familiar old self - a good of sorts, a limited, transient, unsupported good. But he believes in it, he is stuffed full of it and not even God can fill what is already full.

Little Nellie's tombstone at Sunday's Well, Co. Cork

There was no stopping to take a degree in theology on the way, no nights of angst and days of doubt. They had glimpsed love and ran straight into the desert, straight up the mountain, straight into the ocean. Of course it would mean suffering, but that was necessary so they welcomed it because it fostered love. They never for an instant, it seems, considered an alternative.

And...The Epilogue:

For most of us, the older we get, the younger God gets, so that by the time we are tidying up for death we are just about coming to terms with Bethlehem. This is because we imagine that our spiritual progress depends on our own navigation. But it doesn’t. And this is the big lesson that Jacinta Marto and Nellie Organ teach us.

It is not easy to be taught by children, but unless we attend to what these children have to impart, we will never have a grasp of essentails. Their holiness wasn’t the result of a system of prayer or a series of lectures. It was the result of a talent they were given, a talent, and what was needed to develop and perfect that talent. Only God is Holy and He can make that Holiness available as easily in Nellie’s cot as in a Carthusian’s cell. All that Nellie, or the Carthusian, have to do is make room for Him to the point where they can say, “ ‘now I live, not I, but Christ lives in me’ - and, for the record, if you are wondering where I’ve got to, I’m living in him.”

That is the talent. That’s it.

It’s not that simple, some might say, and they would be right - it’s not that simple. It’s simpler. Infinitely simpler, but ‘simple’ will do for a start.

We are all given the talent, the spark, though on different levels and in different degrees. No two voices in the choir are exactly the same; if they were there would be no harmony, just louder song. No two actors have the same skills, if they did we would have exceedingly dull theatre. No two saints are the same because infinite diversity is of the nature of God. Jacinta and Nellie, for all their accidental similarities would, if they were the only two humans God ever created, appear to the angels as distinctive as the lion and the unicorn before His throne.