Teresa Grillo Michel

Maddalena Teresa Grillo was born on 25 September 1855 at Spinetta Marengo, near Alessandria in Piedmont, then in the Kingdom of Sardinia. She was the youngest of five children of Giuseppe Grillo, a physician who directed the civil hospital of Alessandria, and Maria Antonietta Parvopassu. Raised in a prosperous Catholic household, she was sent to Turin for her education and boarded with the Baptistine Sisters. After finishing school she returned to Alessandria and entered the social world of the provincial bourgeoisie of late nineteenth-century Piedmont.

On 2 August 1877 she married Giovanni Battista Michel, a captain in the Bersaglieri. Military assignments took the couple to a succession of Italian garrison towns, among them Caserta, Acireale, Catania, Portici and Naples. Giovanni Michel died suddenly of sunstroke on 13 June 1891. The shock of widowhood left Teresa in a prolonged depression. In time she found a model for a new life in the example of Saint Giuseppe Benedetto Cottolengo, whose Little House of Divine Providence in Turin had shown how trust in God could be joined to practical care for the abandoned.

She opened her own house in Alessandria to orphans and the destitute, sold property to support the work, and on 8 January 1899 founded the Little Sisters of Divine Providence (Piccole Suore della Divina Provvidenza). Taking the religious name Teresa, she and her companions dedicated themselves to the education of poor children, nursing, and assistance to the elderly, living in evangelical poverty and reliance on Divine Providence. The congregation obtained diocesan recognition and later spread beyond Piedmont; houses were established elsewhere in Italy and, during her lifetime, in Brazil, which she herself visited.

Teresa Grillo Michel continued to govern and visit her communities into old age. She died in Alessandria on 25 January 1944, during the Second World War, at the age of eighty-eight. Pope John Paul II beatified her in Saint Peter's Square on 24 May 1998. Her feast is kept on 25 January. The Little Sisters of Divine Providence remain active in several countries, continuing the charitable apostolate she began in late nineteenth-century Alessandria.