Maria Raffaella Cimatti

Maria Raffaella Cimatti was born Santina Cimatti on 6 June 1861 in Celle di Faenza, in the Emilia-Romagna region of north-central Italy, the third of six children of Giacomo Cimatti and Santa Gallegati. The household was a poor farming family. Her father died in 1882, leaving the family in reduced circumstances, and Santina remained at home for several years to help support her mother and younger siblings. Two of her brothers later entered the priesthood: Luigi became a diocesan priest, and Vincenzo Cimatti joined the Salesians of Don Bosco and spent a long missionary career in Japan.

Only after family duties had eased did she follow a religious vocation. In 1889 she entered the congregation of the Daughters of Our Lady of Mercy (Figlie di Nostra Signora della Misericordia), founded at Savona by Saint Maria Giuseppa Rossello, and took the religious name Maria Raffaella. She was formed as a nurse and later qualified to work as a pharmacist, serving in the congregation’s hospitals and infirmaries. Her assignments included hospital work in Florence and, from the early 1920s, a long period at the civil hospital of Alatri in the province of Frosinone, where she served as pharmacist and as local superior.

Those who knew her remembered a quiet, practical charity and professional competence that extended beyond the hospital itself. During the Second World War, when central Italy was a theatre of fighting and displacement, she is reported to have continued to care for the sick and to have aided people in need in Alatri without distinction. She remained at her post until her final illness.

She died in Alatri on 23 June 1945. Pope John Paul II beatified her in Saint Peter’s Square on 12 May 1996. The Catholic Church commemorates her on 23 June. She has not been canonized.