Saint Paulina

Amábile Lucia Visintainer was born on 16 December 1865 in Vigolo Vattaro, a village in the County of Tyrol then belonging to the Austrian Empire and today in the Trentino region of northern Italy. She was a daughter of Antonio Napoleone Visintainer and Anna Pianezzer, a Catholic family of modest means. In 1875 the Visintainers joined other Italian-speaking Tyrolean immigrants and settled in the colonial zone of Nova Trento in the state of Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. There she grew up amid the hardships of pioneer agricultural life, with only limited formal schooling but a strong religious formation. From childhood she was noted for prayer, self-denial, and care for the sick and the poor of the settlement.

In her adolescence she began gathering other young women for works of mercy, including nursing a neighbor who was dying of cancer. In 1890, together with Virginia Nicolodi and Teresa Anna Maule, she founded a community that became the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, taking the religious name Pauline of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus (Paulina do Coração Agonizante de Jesus). The institute devoted itself to the Christian education of children, care of orphans and the elderly, nursing of the sick, and service to impoverished immigrant families. The congregation grew from Santa Catarina into São Paulo. Mother Pauline served as its first superior and guided the sisters through the difficulties of a new foundation in a missionary setting.

In 1909, after internal tensions and decisions of ecclesiastical authority, she was removed from the office of superior general and sent away from the center of government of her own congregation. She accepted the measure in silence and spent the following decades in subordinate tasks, including kitchen work and the care of patients in the congregation’s houses and hospitals, especially in the Ipiranga district of São Paulo. Contemporaries later testified to her patience, obedience, and refusal to defend herself. In later life she developed diabetes mellitus; complications led to the amputation of a finger and subsequently of her right arm. She continued a hidden life of prayer until her death on 9 July 1942 in São Paulo.

After her death, devotion to Mother Pauline spread in Brazil. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 18 October 1991 and canonized by the same pontiff on 19 May 2002, and is widely honored as the first woman raised to the altars in connection with the Church in Brazil. Her liturgical memorial is observed on 9 July. Her relics are venerated at the Sanctuary of Saint Pauline in Nova Trento, Santa Catarina. Because of her own long struggle with diabetes, she is commonly invoked as a patron of people living with that disease. The congregation she founded continues its apostolate of education and care of the poor and the sick in Brazil and elsewhere.