Mary Crucified di Rosa
Woman of Brescia who nursed the wounded under fire during the Italian wars of independence, founder of the Handmaids of Charity.
- 19th century
- Italy
- Feast day December 15
- 1813 – 1855
- Nun
- Founder
- Virgin
Listen to the life 0:41
Daughter of a wealthy Brescian industrialist, Paola di Rosa was managing her father's mill workers at seventeen. She founded in turn a house for deaf-mute girls, a refuge for abandoned young women, and in 1840 the Handmaids of Charity, devoted to the sick. During the cholera epidemic of 1836 and then the Ten Days of Brescia in 1849, she went into the military hospitals and out under the bombardment to tend the wounded of both sides — Austrians as well as Italians. Worn out, she died at forty-two; Pius XII canonised her in 1954.
