Maria Maddalena dell’Incarnazione

Maria Maddalena dell’Incarnazione was born Caterina Sordini on 16 April 1770 in Porto Santo Stefano, a coastal town on the Argentario peninsula in Tuscany, then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In 1788 she entered the monastery of Franciscan tertiaries at Ischia di Castro, in the present-day province of Viterbo, and received the religious name Maria Maddalena dell’Incarnazione. In the cloister she formed a strong Eucharistic piety. Accounts preserved by her later congregation describe interior locutions and visions in which she understood herself to be called to establish a new community devoted to uninterrupted adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century she left Ischia di Castro for Rome to carry out that project. With a small group of companions she founded the Institute of the Perpetual Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament (Adoratrici Perpetue del Santissimo Sacramento). Pope Pius VII supported the foundation. The Napoleonic occupation of the Papal States and the captivity of Pius VII interrupted conventual life: the community was dispersed and the foundress’s work was delayed until papal government was restored, after which the sisters resumed enclosure and perpetual adoration in Rome.

She spent her remaining years forming the young institute in a life of enclosure, liturgical prayer, and continuous adoration before the Eucharist. She died in Rome on 8 November 1824. The congregation continued after her death and later spread beyond Italy.

The cause of beatification proceeded in the twentieth century. Pope John Paul II recognized her heroic virtues and declared her Venerable on 24 April 2001. A miracle attributed to her intercession was approved, and she was beatified on 3 May 2008 during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI; the rite was celebrated in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 8 November. She has not been canonized.