Saint María Josepha Rossello

Saint Maria Giuseppa Rossello was born Benedetta Rossello on 27 May 1811 in Albissola Marina, a coastal town in Liguria known for its ceramics, then in the Kingdom of Sardinia. She was the fourth of nine children of Bartolomeo Rossello and Maria Detotto. The family was poor, and her formal schooling was limited, but she was raised in the popular Catholic piety of early nineteenth-century Liguria. As a young woman she joined the Third Order of Saint Francis, worked as a domestic servant, taught catechism to children, and assisted the sick and the needy. She wished to enter religious life, yet her family could not provide the dowry then customarily required by established convents, so she remained in the world while continuing works of charity.

In 1837 the bishop of Savona, Agostino Maria De Mari, who sought a community to educate and protect poor and abandoned girls, invited her and a few companions to begin a new institute. They started community life in Savona that year under the title of the Daughters of Our Lady of Mercy (Figlie di Nostra Signora della Misericordia). Benedetta took the name Maria Giuseppa and became the first superior. The earliest years were marked by poverty, cramped quarters, and local skepticism, but the sisters opened a school and received orphans. Confidence in their work grew, further houses were founded in Liguria and then elsewhere in Italy, and the apostolate widened to hospitals, care of the elderly, and other forms of assistance, always with a preference for those who had no other help.

Maria Giuseppa remained superior general until her death, combining practical administration with a reputation for austerity and kindness. She insisted that the sisters stay close to the poor and that the education of girls be both useful and Christian. The legal and political changes that accompanied Italian unification in the mid-nineteenth century created obstacles for religious communities, including limits on property and vows, yet the congregation survived and continued to expand. Contemporary accounts describe her as a woman of prayer often sought for counsel; later devotion attributed various charismatic gifts to her, though such claims belong to the tradition of her cult rather than to strictly documented history.

She died in Savona on 7 December 1880 after a period of declining health. Devotion to her spread in her congregation and in the diocese of Savona. Pope Pius XI beatified her on 6 November 1938, and Pope Pius XII canonized her on 12 June 1949. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 7 December. The congregation she founded remains active in education, health care, and social work in Italy and in other countries, and her remains are venerated at the motherhouse in Savona.