Benedetta Gattorno was born in Genoa to a wealthy family. Married at twenty-one, she was widowed six years later, with two young children to care for – one of them deaf and mute. Despite these challenges, she underwent what she called a “conversion” to greater love of God and her neighbors. Already a daily communicant, she took private vows of chastity and obedience, later adding poverty when she became a Franciscan tertiary.
Her confessor urged her to established a religious congregation, but she worried about what would happen to her children. In this, she received encouragement from Pope Pius IX. During an audience, he reassured her that God would provide for her children. And so, in 1866, she founded the Daughters of St. Anne (named for the mother of Mary), and later took the name Anna Rosa. The mission of the sisters was to be “Servants of the poor and ministers of mercy,” seeking out and responding to all forms of suffering – whether among the poor, the abandoned, orphans, the sick, or elderly. She took a special interest in deaf children.
In 1878, the first sisters left Italy to establish houses in Latin America and other parts of Europe. By the time of Anna Rosa’s death on May 6, 1900, there were thirty-five hundred sisters at work in over three hundred houses. She was beatified in 2000.
Elizabeth Hayes, the daughter of an Anglican priest, pursued a circuitous spiritual journey. Starting out in an Anglican religious community in Oxford, she converted to Catholicism and later joined a Franciscan community in Greenwich. Aside from the traditional three religious vows, she took a fourth – to make herself available to the needs of mission. Her subsequent journey led her to Jamaica, then France, and finally to Belle Prairie, Minnesota, at that time a remote outpost. Operating out of a log cabin with a small group of sisters, she formed the Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.
They faced enormous hurdles. At one point, Mother Mary Ignatius Hayes, as she was now known, travelled to Italy, hoping to find other Franciscans willing to join her in the prairie. She returned alone. But, eventually, her community grew and she decided it was time to spread out – this time to serve the African American in the South. In 1879, she established a new community in Georgia, providing education to the children of recently freed slaves.
The next year, she traveled to Rome for an audience with Pope Leo XIII. He persuaded her to open a novitiate in Rome. She complied, though it meant she would never return to the United States. She died on May 6, 1894.
Constanza Troiani was born in Italy in 1813. At the age of six, following her mother’s death, she was entrusted to the Franciscan Sisters of Ferentino. At sixteen, in the convent in which she was raised, she was accepted as a novice, taking the name Sr. Mary Catherine of St. Rose of Viterbo.
Many years passed. One day, a visiting priest just back from Egypt spoke of the need of sisters is Cairo. Mary Catherine, who had always yearned to be a missionary, won permission from her convent to accept this challenge and with five other sisters departed for Cairo. Once there – the first Italian sisters in Egypt – they set about learning Arabic and embarked on care for the poor, opening an orphanage that welcomed children of all races and religious backgrounds.
Yet, her convent had considered this a temporary mission, and when the sisters were instructed to return, they faced a dilemma. Choosing to sever ties with their congregation, they received a permission from Rome to establish a new congregation: the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Egypt. Along with their previous work, Mother Mary Catherine, known widely as “Mother of the poor,” fearlessly took up the antislavery cause. Asked by a sister during an outbreak of cholera whether anything frightened her, she replied,
“My dear, only a lack of faith frightens me.”
Her passing, on May 6, 1887, was mourned throughout Cairo by Christians and Muslims alike. She was beatified in 1985.
This married couple lived in the Italian town of Poggibonsi, where Luchesio worked as a merchant and moneylender. His life was marked by no special motive beyond making money. Sometime in his thirties, however, a change came over him, prompted perhaps by the death of his children. He gave up his business and distributed his wealth, keeping only a small plot of land to farm. He and his wife, Buonadonna, began to serve the sick and poor, sharing their food with those less fortunate and entrusting themselves to Providence.
At this point, St. Francis of Assisi happened to visit their town on one of his preaching tours. The couple were taken by his message and asked if there was not some way for them to follow his path without separating and entering religious life. Francis had longed to establish a Third Order in the Franciscan family for laypeople living in the world. Happily, he clothed Luchesio and Buonadonna in the plain habit and cord of the order. Tradition remembers them as the first Franciscan tertiaries.
The couple lived on for many years. As Luchesio approached the end of his life, Buonadonna prayed that they might not be separated by death. Her prayer was answered; both husband and wife died on the same day, April 28, 1260.
St. Zita is the patron of servants and domestic workers. Such was her own station for forty-seven years of service from the age of twelve until her death – to a wealthy family in Lucca, Italy. Early on, Zita, a member of the Third Order of St. Francis, was recognized for her unusual piety – a cause for derision among many of the household staff. She rose in the night for prayer and always attended the first Mass in the morning. But apart from such devotions, Zita considered her work itself to be an expression of her spiritual life: ” A servant is not good if she is not industrious; work-shy piety in people of our position in sham piety.” Gradually her qualities won respect and admiration. Her employer even overlooked her generosity to the poor. In her later years, she devoted increasing time to visiting the sick and those in prison. She had a special devotion to those under sentence of death; for these, she prayed without ceasing.
Zita died on April 27, 1278, at the age of sixty. She was canonized in 1696. Among other things, she is often invoked for help in finding lost keys.
