Suggest an Edit — Maria Adeodata Pisani

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Biography

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Maria Adeodata Pisani was born Maria Teresa Pisani in Naples on 29 December 1806, the only child of a Maltese noble father, commonly identified as Baron Benedetto Pisani Mompalao Cuzkeri, and a Neapolitan mother, Vincenza Carrano. Her childhood was marked by a broken household. Later biographical accounts describe her parents' marriage as unhappy and her father as violent and given to drink; he became involved in a political revolt against Bourbon rule in Naples, was condemned, and was eventually exiled to Malta, while her mother entered a conservatory in Naples. The girl was raised for a time by her grandmother in Naples. In the early 1820s she went to Malta to live with her father and received further education connected with the Benedictine monastery of Saint Peter in Mdina. She was already noted for piety and for helping the poor.

On 16 July 1828 she entered the Benedictine community of Saint Peter's Monastery in Mdina as a novice and took the religious name Maria Adeodata. She made her solemn profession about two years later. In some twenty-seven years of enclosed monastic life she served as porter, sacristan, and mistress of novices, and she also held the office of abbess for a short period in the early 1850s, despite persistent ill health. Those who knew her remembered humility, devotion to the Eucharist and to the Virgin Mary, and practical charity toward people who came to the monastery gate.

She left spiritual writings, of which the best known is a work commonly called The Mystical Garden of the Soul that Loves Jesus and Mary, a compilation of reflections on prayer and the interior life rather than a formal theological treatise. She suffered from heart disease and died at the monastery in Mdina on 25 February 1855, aged forty-eight. Her remains have been kept at Saint Peter's Monastery in Mdina.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on 9 May 2001 in Floriana, Malta, during an apostolic visit, together with other Maltese Servants of God. She has not been canonized. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 25 February. She is remembered above all in Malta as a Benedictine nun of the nineteenth century, not as the holder of a wide list of official patronages.

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