Claudia Russo

Born in 1889 at Barra, then a separate town east of Naples, she took charge very young of the poor and the old of her own street, with no organisation but her own. Young women began to follow her; her spiritual director advised her to make a company of them. They first visited the sick at home, then, from 1914, began to take elderly people without family into their own house. The institute relates that the decision came from a scene: a young man had slipped an apple into the hands of an old man he thought asleep, and left smiling at the idea that he would credit an angel with it; the next morning he found him dead, the apple still clutched. On 20 June 1926, after two years of building, she opened at Barra the Pia Casa for destitute old women: that day the Poor Daughters of the Visitation of Mary were born, approved by Cardinal Ascalesi in 1933 and recognised as of pontifical right in 1947. She died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 11 March 1964, aged seventy-four. Her congregation now cares for the aged in Italy, Brazil, Ecuador and Togo. Benedict XVI declared her venerable on 20 December 2012; her cause has gone no further, and the Church therefore pays her no public cult as yet.