Floralba Rondi

Floralba Rondi was born on 10 December 1924 in Pedrengo, in the province of Bergamo in Lombardy, northern Italy. She grew up in a Catholic setting characteristic of that region and entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Saints Bartolomea Capitanio and Vincenza Gerosa, an institute founded in the nineteenth century at Lovere and popularly known as the Sisters of Maria Bambina. The congregation’s apostolate centered on education, nursing, and service to the poor. After religious formation and profession she trained as a nurse, work that shaped the rest of her life.

In the later twentieth century she was sent as a missionary to Burundi in the African Great Lakes region. There she exercised her nursing and pastoral ministry among a population divided by long-standing Hutu–Tutsi tensions. After the 1993 assassination of Burundi’s first democratically elected president the country slid into civil war; massacres and reprisals continued through the mid-1990s. Sister Floralba remained at her post, providing medical care without distinction of ethnicity.

On 7 September 1995 armed men attacked the sisters’ residence at the mission of Nyamutobo in the Diocese of Ruyigi. Floralba Rondi, then seventy years old, was killed together with three other Italian members of her congregation who had likewise refused to abandon the people they served. Contemporary accounts present the attack as occurring in the midst of the civil conflict rather than as an isolated criminal act.

Public sources preserve few details of her personality or of her years before the African mission; she was an obscure figure until her death drew attention to the congregation’s work in Burundi. Church authorities later examined the four deaths under the heading of martyrdom. She is remembered within her institute and among local Catholics as one of a group of women religious who stayed with those in their care even when their own lives were at risk.