Blessed Lindalva Justo de Oliveira

Lindalva Justo de Oliveira, DC (20 October 1953 - 9 April 1993) was a Brazilian Catholic member of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul. Oliveira worked at Dom Pedro II Home, a retirement facility, where she was killed in 1993 after a man obsessed with her stabbed her 44 times when she refused his advances. Oliveira's beatification received the approval of Pope Benedict XVI, who determined that she was killed in defensum castitatis (in defense of chastity). She was beatified on 2 December 2007, with Cardinal José Saraiva Martins presiding. Lindalva Justo de Oliveira was born on 20 October 1953 in Brazil as the sixth of thirteen children to the farmer João Justo da Fé - a widower with three children - and Maria Lúcia da Fé (b. 1923); two brothers were Antonio and Djamla. As of 2014 her mother was still alive at age 91. Antonio was an alcoholic and went sober not long after she penned a letter to him. Oliveira received her baptism on 7 January 1954 in the parish of Saint John the Baptist in the Chapel of Olho D'Água from Monsignor Júlio Alves Bezerra. Around 1961 her parents took their children elsewhere so as to provide for their educational needs. She received her First Communion on 15 December 1965 and as of 1971 began to help raise her three nephews. Her parents tried to convince her to wed at this time but she deflected the conversation and instead said that she had three sons: her brother's three children that she helped care for. Oliveira lived with her brother Djamla in Natal for a time and received an administrative assistant's diploma in 1979. From 1978 until a decade later she worked in retail sales and also as a cashier at a petrol station. This was to provide for her ailing father and her mother and after the death of her father was for her mother's financial situation; leftover wages were for her personal use and she lived in Natal during this time. As her father was on his deathbed in 1982 she aided him in his last months.