Maria Teresa Fasce

Maria Giovanna Fasce was born on 27 December 1881 in Torriglia, a mountain town in the province of Genoa in northern Italy, to Eugenio Fasce and Teresa Valente. She was baptized the day after her birth. Her mother died when Giovanna was eight years old; her father remarried, and her stepmother Luigia Barbiero took part in raising her. She received her education from the Canossian Sisters in Genoa and from youth showed a marked religious sensibility. Around the beginning of the twentieth century she read an account of Saint Rita of Cascia, the Augustinian nun venerated as a saint of the impossible, and felt drawn to the same monastery in the Umbrian town of Cascia where Rita had lived.

Her family opposed a cloistered vocation, and the nuns of Cascia at first declined to receive her, in part because of her health and the impoverished condition of their house. She persisted and in 1906 was admitted to the Monastery of Saint Rita, taking the religious name Maria Teresa. She completed her novitiate and made profession as an Augustinian nun. The community was small, poor, and in need of renewal. She later served as novice mistress, forming younger sisters in the Augustinian rule and in devotion to Saint Rita.

In 1920 she was elected abbess, an office she occupied for most of the rest of her life through successive terms. As abbess she directed the material restoration of the dilapidated monastery, promoted the cult of Saint Rita and pilgrimages to Cascia, and oversaw construction of a new church that later developed into the Basilica of Saint Rita of Cascia. She also founded a home for orphaned and abandoned girls known as the Beehive of Saint Rita (L'Alveare di Santa Rita), giving them education and a Christian upbringing. These works went forward despite her own worsening health.

From the 1930s she suffered a succession of grave illnesses, including a malignant tumor that required surgery, diabetes, chronic asthma, and severe circulatory disease. In her last years she was largely confined to a wheelchair and to her cell, yet she continued to govern the community and to offer spiritual counsel. She was known for practical energy, fidelity to Augustinian prayer and common life, and patient endurance of pain. Maria Teresa Fasce died in the monastery at Cascia on 18 January 1947. Her reputation for holiness led to the opening of her cause. Pope John Paul II beatified her in Saint Peter's Square on 12 October 1997.