Virgin Angela Merici

Angela Merici was born in 1474 at Desenzano del Garda, on the southwestern shore of Lake Garda in the territory of the Republic of Venice. She came from a family of moderately prosperous farmers or small landowners. Orphaned while still a child by the death of both parents, she and her sister were received by an uncle in the nearby town of Salò. The later sudden death of that sister affected her profoundly. Traditional lives of the saint relate that she then received a vision of her sister in glory, which strengthened her resolve to live for God. She entered the Third Order of Saint Francis, taking up a life of prayer, fasting, and works of mercy while remaining in secular dress and in the world rather than in a monastery.

After the death of her uncle she returned to Desenzano. There she began to gather local girls in her home in order to teach them the catechism and the practices of Christian life, work that was unusual at a time when systematic religious instruction for girls was rare. A further vision, associated in the sources with a family property at Brudazzo, in which she saw a company of virgins, was later understood as a foreshadowing of the community she would found. About 1516 she moved to Brescia, a city then under Venetian rule, at first to console a bereaved widow, and Brescia became her home for the remainder of her life. In 1524 she made a pilgrimage toward the Holy Land. The early biographies state that she lost her sight at Crete on the outward voyage and recovered it at the same island on the return. During the Jubilee of 1525 she went to Rome and was received by Pope Clement VII, who, according to those accounts, wished her to remain in the city to govern a group of nursing sisters; she refused and went back to Brescia.

On 25 November 1535, Angela and twenty-eight companions constituted themselves as the Company of Saint Ursula in Brescia, placing the new company under the protection of Saint Ursula, the legendary leader of a band of virgin martyrs. The institute was a striking departure from the enclosed convent: members did not take solemn public vows, did not wear a distinctive religious habit in the manner of nuns, and continued to live in their own households, coming together for prayer and for the education of girls. Angela wrote a Rule for the company and, later, Counsels and a Testament for those who would govern after her. These writings insist on charity, humility, and a form of authority modeled on maternal care rather than on domination. She was elected the first Mother of the company.

Angela Merici died in Brescia on 27 January 1540 and was buried in the church of Saint Afra. That church was in later centuries rededicated to her, and her remains have continued to be venerated there; tradition has regarded her body as incorrupt. In the decades after her death the Company of Saint Ursula spread through northern Italy and beyond. Under the influence of Charles Borromeo and others, a number of Ursuline communities were reorganized as a cloistered religious order devoted to the education of girls, and the Ursulines became one of the first and most important teaching orders of women in the Catholic Church. Angela was beatified by Pope Clement XIII in 1768 and canonized by Pope Pius VII in 1807. In the General Roman Calendar her feast is observed on 27 January, the day of her death.