Saint Angela Merici

Virgin

Feast Day

January 27

Life

1474–1540

Canonized

1807

Order

Foundress, Order of Saint Ursula (Ursulines)

Born

Desenzano del Garda, Republic of Venice

Angela Merici was born March 21, 1474, in Desenzano del Garda on the southern shore of Lake Garda. Orphaned of both parents in adolescence, she became a tertiary of the Order of Saint Francis and gathered around her young women dedicated to the catechetical instruction of girls.

She made pilgrimages to the Holy Land in 1524 (during which she was temporarily blinded) and to Rome in 1525 for the jubilee of Clement VII. She settled in Brescia, where on November 25, 1535, she gathered twenty-eight companions in the church of Saint Afra and instituted the Compagnia di Sant'Orsola, the Company of Saint Ursula, placing it under the patronage of the early martyr.

Her institute was, in its original form, neither a religious order with vows nor a third order: it was a society of women living celibate lives in their own homes, dedicated to the Christian instruction of girls, especially the poor. This was a radically new form of consecrated life for women in the Western Church, anticipating later forms of secular institutes by four centuries. The Rule of the Company, dictated by Angela in 1535, sets out a model of formation in piety, modesty, and good Christian education.

Angela died at Brescia on January 27, 1540. She was beatified by Clement XIII in 1768 and canonized by Pope Pius VII on May 24, 1807. After her death, her foundation gradually transformed: Pope Saint Pius V approved the Ursulines as a religious order with vows in 1572, and from these the great teaching congregations of Ursulines spread to France and to colonial New France in the seventeenth century, where Saint Marie of the Incarnation founded the first school for girls in North America.