Feast day: December 15
St. Maria Crocifissa di Rosa
An Italian industrialist's daughter who organized care for the sick, the deaf, and abandoned girls, founded a nursing congregation, and led her sisters onto the battlefields to tend the wounded.
Maria Crocifissa di Rosa — born Paola di Rosa in 1813 at Brescia, in northern Italy — was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and from her youth combined a deep piety with a remarkable gift for practical organization. Leaving school, she helped manage her father's household and business affairs, but her heart was set on serving the poor and the suffering.
She threw herself into an astonishing range of charitable works: she cared for the girls who worked in her father's mills, founded houses for the deaf and for abandoned and endangered young women, and organized retreats and religious instruction. Above all she gave herself to the sick.
During the cholera epidemics and the wars that swept northern Italy, she organized teams of women to nurse the sick in the hospitals and the wounded on the battlefields, working amid scenes of horror and danger with calm, fearless charity. Out of these labours she founded, in 1840, a congregation of nursing sisters, the Handmaids of Charity of Brescia.
She drove herself without sparing, and died worn out in 1855, only forty-two. Canonized in 1954, she is remembered as a model of practical, organized charity — a woman who turned her gifts and her wealth entirely to the service of the sick and the poor.
During war she led her sisters into military hospitals under fire to nurse soldiers of both sides, and died worn out at forty-two.
Image: This picture belongs to Xavier Caré. Please credit : Xavier Caré / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA. If you would like speci (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: vatican.va/content/pius-xii/it/speeches/1954/documents/hf_p-xii_spe_19540612_canonizzazione.html
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