Mary Magdalen Bentivoglio

Mary Magdalen Bentivoglio, born Countess Annetta Bentivoglio, was an Italian nun of the Order of Saint Clare who led the first successful establishment of Poor Clare monastic life in the United States. She was born in Rome on 29 July 1824, during the Restoration-era Papal States, as one of the sixteen children of Count Domenico Bentivoglio, of the historic Bolognese noble house of Bentivoglio, and his wife Angela Ramacci. The family belonged to the Roman aristocracy and was known for its loyalty to the papacy. Annetta and her sister Constance received a conventional pious education and, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, entered the Poor Clare monastery of San Lorenzo in Panisperna on the Viminal Hill in Rome. There Annetta received the religious name Mary Magdalen of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The community observed the Urbanist Rule, a fifteenth-century papal mitigation of the original thirteenth-century Rule of Saint Clare.

By the 1870s the Catholic Church in the United States was growing rapidly through immigration, yet it possessed no monastery of cloistered Poor Clares. Pope Pius IX selected the Bentivoglio sisters for a founding mission overseas. They left Italy in 1875 and landed in New York that October. Neither the Archdiocese of New York nor, subsequently, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati proved able to offer them a stable enclosure: in Cincinnati the collapse of the Purcell family bank and the resulting archdiocesan debt made a new contemplative foundation impossible. In 1877 Archbishop Napoléon-Joseph Perché of New Orleans gave them a house, but heat, poverty, linguistic isolation, and recurrent yellow fever made the Louisiana experiment unsustainable.

Bishop James O’Connor of Omaha then invited the sisters to Nebraska. In 1878 they opened a monastery in Omaha that is regarded as the first permanent Poor Clare foundation in the United States. The community soon became entangled in a prolonged controversy over observance. European Colettine Poor Clares, who followed a stricter reform associated with Saint Colette of Corbie, were introduced into the house, while Mother Mary Magdalen and her original companions had been formed in the Urbanist tradition. Disputes over poverty, enclosure, and authority involved the local bishop and were referred to Rome. The conflict reshaped the Omaha monastery and eventually separated Mother Mary Magdalen from that community.

In 1897, with the consent of the Bishop of Indianapolis, she founded a new Poor Clare monastery in Evansville, Indiana, where she served as abbess. She died there on 18 August 1905. The houses at Omaha and Evansville, together with the sisters formed under her, became the starting point for later Poor Clare monasteries across North America. She has not been beatified or canonized by the Catholic Church; her reputation rests on her historical role as a foundress who transplanted a medieval contemplative order into the very different social and ecclesiastical landscape of the nineteenth-century United States.