Teresa Margaret Redi

Anna Maria Redi was born on 15 July 1747 in Arezzo, in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, into a prominent noble family. She was the daughter of Ignazio Redi and Camilla Billeti and was baptized on the day of her birth. Raised in a devout household, she received a careful Christian education. At about the age of nine she was sent to Florence to be educated by the Benedictine nuns of the monastery of Saint Apollonia, where she remained for several years and formed a strong interior life of prayer. After returning to her family she resolved to enter religious life.

Drawn to the contemplative vocation and inspired by the writings and example of Saint Teresa of Ávila, she sought admission to the Discalced Carmelites. She entered the Carmelite monastery of Saint Teresa in Florence in 1764, taking the religious name Teresa Margaret of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She received the habit the following year and made her profession in 1766. In the cloister she pursued a deliberately hidden life of humility, obedience, and charity, seeking to remain unnoticed while practicing the Carmelite ideals of prayer, silence, and self-denial.

She was especially devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the mystery of divine love. She served her community as infirmarian, attending sick sisters with notable gentleness and constancy. Those who lived with her later testified to her spirit of recollection, her patience under trial, and her desire to conceal any extraordinary graces. In early March 1770 she was stricken with a sudden and severe illness, generally described in the sources as an acute abdominal or gangrenous condition, and she died in the monastery on 7 March 1770 at the age of twenty-two.

After her death her body was found to be incorrupt and was reported to have given off a fragrance, which helped sustain an early local cult. The cause for her beatification advanced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pope Pius XI beatified her on 9 June 1929 and canonized her on 19 March 1934. Her feast is kept on 7 March, the anniversary of her death. Her remains are venerated in the Carmelite monastery of Saint Teresa in Florence.