Leonella Sgorbati

Leonella Sgorbati was born Rosa Maria Sgorbati on 9 December 1940 in Gazzola, in the province of Piacenza in northern Italy. The youngest of three children, she lost her father in childhood, after which the family settled in Milan. There she completed her schooling and discerned a vocation to missionary religious life. In 1963 she entered the Consolata Missionary Sisters at Sanfrè in Piedmont. She made her first profession in the mid-1960s and later perpetual vows. In preparation for work in Africa she trained as a nurse in Italy and obtained further qualifications in midwifery in England.

In 1970 she was assigned to Kenya, beginning a long period of service in hospitals and clinics of her congregation. She worked for years in the region of Nyeri and elsewhere in Kenya, combining bedside care with the training of local nurses. She later served as regional superior of the Consolata Missionary Sisters in Kenya. In the early years of the twenty-first century she accepted an assignment in Mogadishu, Somalia, then without a stable national government and marked by clan conflict and insecurity. At a hospital linked to the SOS Children's Village she devoted herself to forming Somali nursing students, remaining in the city despite repeated warnings about the danger.

On 17 September 2006, as she left the hospital with her Somali driver and bodyguard, Mohamed Osman Mahamud, unidentified gunmen opened fire. Both were fatally wounded. She was sixty-five years old. The murder occurred in a period of unrest that followed Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg lecture, and some observers at the time suggested a possible religious motive, though the identities and full intentions of the killers were never publicly established in a conclusive judicial process. Witnesses reported that she expressed forgiveness as she was dying. Mahamud, a Muslim who had protected her, was killed with her.

Her remains were transferred to Nairobi, where the Consolata community celebrated her funeral and buried her in the congregation's cemetery. The Catholic Church opened a cause for her beatification, treating her death as martyrdom. Pope Francis approved the decree recognizing her martyrdom in odium fidei, and she was beatified on 26 May 2018 in the cathedral of Piacenza. Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided in the name of the Pope. She is honored as Blessed Leonella Sgorbati, with her liturgical commemoration on 17 September. She has not been canonized.