Feast day: May 7

St. Rose Venerini

Virgin, Foundress · 1656–1728

Patron of Teachers

An Italian woman who opened one of the first free public schools for girls and founded an order of teaching sisters that spread schools across Italy.

Rose Venerini was born in 1656 at Viterbo, in the Papal States, the daughter of a physician. After the early death of a young man to whom she had been betrothed, she briefly entered a convent, but soon left to care for her widowed mother — and there discovered her true calling.

Gathering the women and girls of her neighbourhood in the evenings to pray the rosary, she was struck by how little they knew of their faith, and how few opportunities girls had for any education at all. With the encouragement of a Jesuit director, she resolved to do something about it.

In 1685 she opened a free school for girls at Viterbo — one of the first public schools for girls in Italy — and gathered teachers to run it. Despite opposition and suspicion, her schools multiplied across the region, and she trained the teachers herself, developing methods that won the admiration of churchmen and educators alike.

She founded some forty schools before her death in Rome in 1728. Devoted entirely to lifting up poor and uneducated girls, she was canonized in 2006 and is honoured as a pioneer of women's education.

She founded over forty free schools for girls at a time when few thought girls worth educating — a pioneer of public education for women.

Image: inconnu oeuvre de 1699 (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20061015_venerini_en.html