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. The life follows her through pilgrimages, through the strange episode of her sudden blindness on the way to the Holy Land and the recovery of her sight on the return journey, and through her visit to Rome in the jubilee year, where even the pope would have liked to keep her in different work. Yet she keeps turning back to the vocation that is becoming clearer to her at Brescia. There, after war and dislocation, she gathers around her a circle of devout women and begins 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 comes in the Company of St Ursula. At first it is 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.