Macrina Raparelli

Macrina Raparelli was born Giuseppina Raparelli in 1893 at Taurianova in Calabria, in southern Italy. She grew up in a region where Latin-rite Catholicism coexisted with the ancient Byzantine-rite communities of the Italo-Albanians. From an early age she was drawn to consecrated life and eventually took the religious name Macrina, invoking Saint Macrina the Younger, the fourth-century sister of Basil the Great and a central figure in the Basilian monastic tradition. Her vocation unfolded in the early twentieth century, a period of social change and of renewed Catholic interest in the Eastern Christian heritage that had survived in southern Italy.

After the First World War she collaborated with the Basilian hieromonk Nilo Borgia of the Exarchic Monastery of Santa Maria di Grottaferrata, the principal remaining center of Italo-Greek monasticism in the West. Together they founded the Congregation of the Basilian Sisters, Daughters of Saint Macrina, a community of women religious of the Byzantine rite. The institute was intended to serve the pastoral, educational, and charitable needs of the Italo-Albanian Catholic population in Calabria and Sicily, whose liturgical and cultural traditions required sisters formed in the same rite. The congregation combined elements of monastic prayer with an active apostolate of teaching, catechesis, and care for the poor and the sick.

Under Mother Macrina’s guidance as foundress and superior, the sisters opened houses in several centers of the Italo-Albanian Church and also undertook missionary work in Albania during the interwar years, until political conditions made that presence impossible. She devoted herself to the formation of the first generations of sisters and to obtaining ecclesiastical recognition for the new congregation. In a Church still overwhelmingly Latin in Italy, her work helped sustain a living Byzantine monastic and apostolic presence among women.

She spent her later years associated with the community at Grottaferrata, near Rome, where the Byzantine monastic tradition remained strong. She died in 1970. The congregation she helped to found continues its work among Italo-Albanian Catholics and in other pastoral settings. She is remembered within her institute and the Italo-Albanian Church as a twentieth-century foundress who sought to renew Basilian and Byzantine religious life for women, though she has not been beatified or canonized.