Maria Di Rosa (1813-1855)

Feast Day: December 15
Canonization: June 12, 1954

Paula Frances Mary Di Rosa was born into a wealthy family in Brescia, Italy. Educated in a convent by Visitation nuns, she left school at age 17 to help manage her father’s household when her mother died. She cared for the spiritual needs of the young girls who worked in her father’s mills, and she volunteered in the Brescia hospital during the 1836 cholera epidemic. Later, she founded a home for girls and a school for deaf mutes.

In 1840, when she was 30 years old, Paula’s spiritual director made her the superior of a group of religious sisters who cared for the sick. She took the religious name Maria Crocifissa di Rosa because of her devotion to the Crucified Christ. The devotion became the basis of her teaching.

Called the Handmaids of Charity, the nuns cared for the poor, sick and suffering. They ministered to the wounded on the battlefields of northern Italy and in hospitals. During a war in Brescia in 1848, Maria confronted plundering soldiers with a crucifix, an act that shamed them and prompted them to leave.

Brescia’s bishop granted formal approval to the Handmaids of Charity in 1843, and in 1850, the community was granted papal approval.