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Biography

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Anna Michelotti, known in religion as Giovanna Francesca of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was born on 29 August 1843 in Annecy, then in the Duchy of Savoy within the Kingdom of Sardinia. She belonged to a modest family and lost her father while still a small child; her mother died while Anna was still an adolescent, leaving her to earn her own living. In the 1860s she worked as a governess and later as a teacher. After Savoy was ceded to France in 1860 she eventually settled, around the beginning of the 1870s, in Turin, capital of the recently unified Kingdom of Italy, where she continued to teach children and to live a life of piety among the urban poor.

Drawn to religious life and to an apostolate among those who were both ill and destitute, she gathered companions in Turin in the mid-1870s and founded the Little Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the Sick Poor (Piccole Serve del Sacro Cuore di Gesù per gli ammalati poveri). The sisters’ distinctive work was to go into the homes of the sick poor who could not obtain hospital care, offering nursing, material help, and spiritual consolation. She assumed the religious name Giovanna Francesca in honor of Saint Jane Frances de Chantal. The new institute received diocesan approval from Lorenzo Gastaldi, Archbishop of Turin. Its spirituality was shaped by nineteenth-century devotion to the Sacred Heart and by the social conditions of industrializing northern Italy, where poverty, overcrowding, and disease were widespread in working-class districts.

Michelotti governed the young congregation amid scarce resources and her own frail health. She died in Turin on 1 February 1888, at the age of forty-four. The community she founded continued after her death and later obtained further ecclesiastical recognition. She was never married and had no children; her adult life was that of a foundress and religious.

The cause of beatification was introduced in the twentieth century, and she was named a Servant of God during the pontificate of Pius XII. Pope Paul VI beatified her on 1 November 1975. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 1 February. She has not been canonized. The Little Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the Sick Poor have continued the home-care apostolate she established. Surviving documentation of her life is that of a relatively obscure nineteenth-century foundress: the principal verified facts concern her Savoyard birth, her work and foundation in Turin, her death in 1888, and her beatification in 1975.

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