Feast day: October 20

St. Maria Bertilla Boscardin

Virgin, Religious · 1888–1922

Patron of Nurses

An Italian farm girl thought too dull for anything but kitchen work who became a nursing sister, tending sick children and wounded soldiers, even under wartime bombardment.

Maria Bertilla Boscardin was born in 1888 to a poor peasant family in northern Italy. Her childhood was hard and unhappy: her father was violent and a heavy drinker, and the girl herself was so slow and simple that she was mocked by others, who called her 'the goose.' She had almost no schooling and seemed destined for nothing but the humblest work.

Drawn nonetheless to give herself to God, she was accepted — reluctantly, given her limitations — into a congregation of sisters devoted to nursing, and was at first assigned only to the kitchen and the laundry. In time she was trained for the wards, and there, in the care of the sick, this 'simple' woman found her true vocation and revealed an unexpected greatness of soul.

She nursed children in a hospital ward, and during the First World War cared for the wounded and for patients under aerial bombardment with calm, tireless, self-forgetful devotion, earning the love of those she served. Her holiness lay entirely in doing humble, exhausting work with extraordinary patience, gentleness, and charity.

She died in 1922, at only thirty-four, after surgery for a long-standing illness. Some of the very patients she had nursed testified at the inquiry into her holiness. Canonized in 1961, she is honoured as a patron of nurses — proof that the overlooked and the 'simple' can become great saints.

Dismissed as slow and clumsy, she nursed children through diphtheria and soldiers under air raids with such courage that the wounded called her their angel.

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/it/homilies/1961/documents/hf_j-xxiii_hom_19610511_bertilla-boscardin.html