St. Angela Merici

Angela Merici was a woman whose outward work grew slowly out of a very hidden interior life. Born near Brescia, she is seen first in prayer, austerity, charity to the poor, and a habit of moving quietly where suffering needed help. She went on pilgrimages, survived the strange episode of her sudden blindness on the way to the Holy Land and recovered her sight on the return journey, and visited Rome in the jubilee year, where even the pope would have liked to keep her in different work. Yet she kept turning back to the vocation that was becoming clearer to her at Brescia. There, after war and dislocation, she gathered around her a circle of devout women and began shaping them for a new kind of service.

The earlier vision in which she had seen maidens ascending to Heaven and was told that before death she would found a company like them remains part of the remembered story, and its fulfillment came in the Company of St. Ursula. At first it was not yet the later enclosed Ursuline order, but a striking new form of Christian life: women consecrated to God, devoted especially to the religious education of girls, often still living with their families, meeting for prayer, instruction, and common purpose. The novelty of it matters. Angela is not remembered only as a pious woman with good ideas. She is the foundress of a form of women's apostolic work that proved unexpectedly durable.