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Biography

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Enrichetta Alfieri was born Maria Angela Domenica Alfieri on 23 February 1891 in Borgo Vercelli, in the province of Vercelli in Piedmont, northern Italy. Raised in a Catholic setting at the close of the nineteenth century, she discerned a vocation to consecrated life and in 1911 entered the Sisters of Charity of Saint Jeanne-Antide Thouret, a congregation founded to serve the poor, the sick, and people on the margins, including those in hospitals and prisons. She received the religious name Enrichetta. After formation and profession she worked as a nurse. Early in her religious life a grave spinal illness (often described in her biographies as Pott’s disease) threatened to end her active service; her recovery allowed her to resume ministry and was remembered in her community as a decisive grace.

In 1939 she was assigned to the San Vittore prison in Milan, where she cared for inmates as a nurse and as a sister offering spiritual and material support. She became known as the Mother of San Vittore. She attended to prisoners without distinction of background. After 1943, under German occupation and the Italian Social Republic, San Vittore held political opponents, members of the Resistance, Allied personnel, and Jews. Sister Enrichetta used her place inside the prison to bring food, medicine, clothing, and messages, and to console people facing interrogation, deportation, or death.

In 1944 German authorities arrested her because of this assistance and accused her of aiding enemies of the regime. She was herself detained, including at San Vittore, and thus experienced prison from the other side. She was released later in 1944. After the liberation of Milan she returned to her work among prisoners and remained associated with that apostolate through the hard years of postwar reconstruction, until illness overtook her.

She died in Milan on 23 November 1951. Her reputation for holiness and her wartime witness led to a cause for beatification. Pope Benedict XVI recognized her heroic virtues in 2009, declaring her Venerable, and she was beatified on 26 June 2011 in Milan, in a ceremony presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato on behalf of the pope. The Church commemorates her on 23 November. Blessed Enrichetta Alfieri is remembered as a witness of Christian charity among the imprisoned and as an example of religious fidelity under persecution in twentieth-century Italy.

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