Feast day: January 27
St. Angela Merici
Founded the Ursulines, the first teaching order of women in the Church, educating girls at a time when nobody else would.
Angela Merici was born in 1474 at Desenzano, on Lake Garda in northern Italy, and was orphaned young. She became a Franciscan tertiary and lived simply, but she was seized early by one particular concern: the religious ignorance of the girls of her region, who had no one to teach them the faith.
She began, almost informally, gathering girls to instruct them. A pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1524 marked her deeply — on the way she went suddenly blind at Crete, continued the journey and venerated the holy places unseeing, and recovered her sight on the return at the very same spot, taking it as a sign to look not with the eyes but with the heart.
In 1535, at Brescia, she founded the Company of St. Ursula — the Ursulines — gathering twenty-eight young women consecrated to God and to the Christian education of girls. It was a radically new idea: not cloistered nuns, but women living in their own homes and families while devoting themselves to teaching. It became the first teaching order of women in the Church.
She died in 1540. Her Company spread across Europe and became one of the great forces in the education of girls and women for centuries. She was canonized in 1807.
Her 'company' of women lived at home rather than in convents — a structure so radical it took the Church decades to catch up.
“Disorder in society is the result of disorder in the family.”
— St. Angela Merici
Image: Pietro Calzavacca (1855-1890) (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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