Maria Laura Mainetti

Sister Maria Laura Mainetti was born Teresina Elsa Mainetti on 20 August 1939 in Colico, in the province of Lecco in Lombardy, northern Italy. She was the youngest of the ten children of Giuseppe Mainetti and Marcellina Gusmeroli. Her father died while she was still a child, and she was raised in a practicing Catholic family on the shores of Lake Como. From adolescence she felt drawn to religious life. In 1957 she entered the Congregation of the Daughters of the Cross (Figlie della Croce, also known as the Sisters of Saint Andrew), a teaching and charitable institute of French origin and of pontifical right. She received the religious name Maria Laura, made her first profession of vows in 1959, and later pronounced perpetual vows.

After profession she served as a teacher and catechist in several houses of her congregation in Italy. In 1984 she was assigned to the convent of the Daughters of the Cross in Chiavenna, in the Alpine Valchiavenna of the province of Sondrio. There she taught, prepared children and adolescents for the sacraments, and for a number of years was superior of the small local community. She was known in the town for her patience, her work among young people, and her attention to the poor and to families in difficulty, and she took part in ordinary parish pastoral care. Those who knew her described her as gentle, prayerful, and readily available to anyone who asked her help.

On the evening of 6 June 2000 three teenage girls from Chiavenna, who had become involved in occult and satanic practices, lured Sister Maria Laura from her convent with a false appeal for help. They had planned to kill a Catholic religious sister as a ritual sacrifice. Near the convent they attacked her with knives and inflicted many stab wounds. According to later judicial findings and accounts given at trial, she prayed and spoke words of forgiveness toward her attackers as she was dying. She died at the place of the assault. The crime caused widespread shock in Italy. The three perpetrators, tried as minors, were convicted of murder. Italian courts and, subsequently, the Holy See regarded the killing as having been carried out in hatred of the Christian faith.

A diocesan inquiry into her life and death was opened in the Diocese of Como, and she was declared a Servant of God. After the Roman examination of the acts, Pope Francis authorized on 21 January 2021 a decree of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints recognizing that Sister Maria Laura had been killed in odium fidei. She was beatified on 6 June 2021 in Chiavenna, on the twenty-first anniversary of her death. Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of that congregation, presided at the rite in the name of the Pope. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 6 June. She has not been canonized, and no official list of patronages has been assigned to her.