Vincenza Maria Poloni

Vincenza Maria Poloni was born Luigia Poloni on 26 January 1802 in Verona, in the Veneto of northern Italy, when the city had recently passed from Venetian to Napoleonic control. She was the daughter of Leonardo Poloni and Gaetana Crosato and is described in the documentation of her cause as the youngest of twelve children in a family engaged in trade. She was baptized shortly after birth and raised in the Catholic faith of her native city. After the deaths of her parents in her adulthood she was free to devote herself more completely to prayer and to the service of the poor, the sick, and the abandoned of Verona, whose needs were acute in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In that same city she encountered the priest Charles Steeb, a German-born cleric who had made Verona his home and who was already active in works of charity and in the formation of the clergy. Together they discerned the need for a community of women who would live a religious life while serving the suffering in hospitals and in private homes. In 1840 they established the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Verona. Luigia Poloni received the religious name Vincenza Maria, linking her identity to Saint Vincent de Paul and to the Virgin Mary. She became the first superior of the congregation and guided its early members in a rule of life that joined contemplation with concrete works of mercy.

The Sisters of Mercy under her direction nursed the ill, accompanied the dying, assisted orphans and the elderly, and sought out those whom other institutions overlooked. Their apostolate unfolded against the background of Austrian rule in Lombardy-Venetia, periodic epidemics, and the social strains of the mid-nineteenth century. Poloni was remembered by her sisters as humble, industrious, and steadfast, forming a community that would survive her and spread beyond Verona. She remained at the head of the institute until the end of her life.

She died in Verona on 11 November 1855. Devotion to her memory was preserved by the congregation she had co-founded. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries her cause of beatification advanced: Pope John Paul II proclaimed her Venerable on 20 December 2004 after the recognition of her heroic virtues. A miracle attributed to her intercession was subsequently approved, and she was beatified in Verona on 21 September 2008 during the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, with Cardinal José Saraiva Martins acting as papal legate. Her feast is kept on 11 November. She has not been canonized. The Sisters of Mercy of Verona continue to claim her as co-foundress and as a model of merciful service.