10. SAINT ANGELA MERICI by Fr John Jay Hughes
(I attach the chapter on your Foundress from my book Columns of Light: 30 Remarkable Saints — also available on CDs from NowYouKnowMedkia.com)
One of the most striking aspects of Church history is the Church’s capacity for self-renewal. Time and time again, when things looked so bleak that many thought they could get no worse, new Spirit-filled forces and people have arisen to bring fresh life to the Church and hope to its members. Renewal of this kind comes most often not from the top, but from the grass roots – from the church’s “little people,” its saints.
The sixteenth century was a particularly bleak time for the Church. It brought something which people at the century’s beginning, in 1500, never imagined was possible: the departure from the Church in the West of whole nations, and the setting up of altar against altar. We call it the Protestant Reformation.
The causes of the Reformation are complex and go back several centuries. I mentioned one in the last talk, about St. Catherine of Siena: the almost four decades, from 1378 to 1417, when no one knew which of two, sometimes three, claimants to the papal throne was the real pope – and yet Church life went on. Is it really surprising that a century later people, starting with Martin Luther, started asking why a pope was necessary at all?
It did not help that too many of the popes on the eve of the Reformation were hardly examples of gospel values. The most notorious example is Alexander VI, who was pope from 1492 to 1503. A man of openly licentious life, he fathered children by more than one woman prior to his election as pope, which he achieved by bribery. As pope, he left his favorite daughter, Lucrezia, in charge of business during his absences from Rome.
In 1523, just twenty years after Alexander’s death, the Dutchman Pope Hadrian VI, the last non-Italian pope until John Paul II and a man of upright life, sent a message to the Reichstag, a kind of imperial parliament, which was deliberating in Nürnberg about how to deal with Luther’s revolt, then in full swing. “We confess in all sincerity,” Hadrian told the Reichstag, “that God permits this persecution of his Church because of the sins of its members, especially its priests and prelates. We are well aware of the detestable things which have occurred here at the Holy See in Rome for many a year: abuses in spiritual things, violations of the commandments, turning aside to every evil way. Hence it is not to be wondered at that the illness has spread from the head to the members, from the pope to the prelates. All of us, prelates and clergy, have forsaken the way of righteousness.” Sadly, Hadrian’s efforts at reform were blocked by those around him and terminated by his early death
It is indicative of the blindness of the Church establishment to the ills mentioned by Hadrian that the Reichstag members, a majority of them bishops or abbots, considered this papal confession of guilt an embarrassing tactical blunder and referred it to a committee – then as now the best way of burying any unwelcome proposal.
The ordinary clergy were not in much better shape than the prelates. There were no seminaries in the middle ages. Save for the small number who studied theology at a university, men prepared for ordination through a kind of apprenticeship system, trained (one can hardly say educated) by priests who were often uneducated themselves. And the number of priests far exceeded any possible pastoral need. The historian H. Maynard Smith has estimated the number of priests in pre-Reformation England at one percent of the total population. If the same percentage prevailed today, the United States would have three million priests. (The actual figure is less than 42,000.)
Most of the men who comprised this vast medieval priestly proletariat had nothing to do but celebrate Mass and pray the Breviary. St. Charles Borromeo, who was archbishop of Milan from 1560 until his death in 1584, wrote after his visitation of the northern Italian diocese of Brescia: “Clergy in the town and throughout the diocese spent their time not in sacred studies, but in idleness and sin. Many hold benefices in which they do not reside. (A benefice was a church office, such as the pastorate of a parish, with an income attached.) Priests frequent the theater and behave there like the idle rich; like them, they wear immodest clothing. As for members of the religious orders, … several scandals about their behavior have become public; many monks give public scandal, above all by their frequent visits to the convents of religious women. Many clergy live in obstinate concubinage.”
Women’s convents were often dumping grounds for girls for whom no husband could be found, often for lack of a dowry. Because of the subordinate state of women in the middle ages, a girl sent by her parents to a convent had little hope of escape. Conditions in some places were so bad that the sixteenth century Italian Capuchin, Mattia Bellintani, judged entering a convent to be one of the obstacles to a life of perfection.
The learned Jesuit, St. Robert Bellarmine, looking back from the end of the sixteenth century, wrote: “Bishops and priests follow Christ, not for himself, but to eat the bread he gives. In the years preceding Luther and Calvin, justice had vanished from the ecclesiastical courts, discipline from morals, and learning from theology. … The glory of the priesthood had so sunk in general esteem that priests were regarded as figures of fun; public opinion mocked at and despised them until they despaired under the weight of their own ill fame. How did things come to this state? It was simply because the shepherds of the flock had lost their sense of values … they had come to regard their pastoral office as a source of revenue and social advancement.”
This is of course not the whole story. In the sixteenth century, as in every age, there were exceptions. If I have concentrated on the evidence of spiritual sickness, it is to make the point that precisely in an age which presented more reasons for pessimism than for optimism about the Church’s spiritual health, the Lord raised up men and women outstanding in holiness, living witnesses of his unchanging love. In this talk, and in the two which follow, I want to introduce you to some of them.
Angela Merici, who is the subject of this talk, was born between 1470 and 1475 at Desenzano, a town on the southern shore of the beautiful Lake Garda in northern Italy. Her father was a prosperous farmer and an educated man. From the age of five Angela listened enthralled as he read to her from the Lives of the Saints. She was especially impressed with St. Ursula. Though now long known to be legendary, she was a great favorite in the middle ages. Ursula was said to be a fifth century British princess who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem with 11,000 virgins and who on their return had all been martyred at Cologne. Angela told a friend years later, that the example of the saints about whom she heard from her father inspired her, while still a young child, to devote herself to a spiritual and contemplative life. Despite performing her full share of household tasks – washing, churning butter, kneading dough for bread and carrying heavy buckets of water from a nearby spring – Angela practiced rigorous fasting.
By her early teens Angela had lost both her parents, and a dearly loved older sister. Angela went to live for a few years at Salò, farther north along Lake Garda’s west shore, with a maternal uncle, who belonged to the lesser nobility of the region. Like most girls in that day, she never went to school. She would learn to read eventually, but needed a secretary for correspondence all her life. In her uncle’s genteel household she learned things that would serve her well years later: good manners, poise, and how to behave with the highly born.
Despite the paucity of information about Angela’s early life, there is general agreement that, during her adolescence, she had a spiritual experience which would prove decisive for her whole subsequent life. Grieving greatly for her deceased sister, she prayed for a sign that the sister was with God. Praying during the midday pause in a field where she was helping with the harvest, Angela had a vision of young virgins, among whom she recognized her sister, who told her that God wanted to use her to found a Confraternity of consecrated virgins. Realization of this call would take a lifetime: a long time in human terms, but for the God of whom the psalmist says, “To your eyes a thousand years are as yesterday … no more than a watch in the night” (Ps. 90), no more than a moment. Angela always insisted that what would become her life’s work came not from her but from God.
Angela’s most authoritative modern biographer, the Ursuline nun Sister Teresa Ledochowska, writes that despite the scanty information about her subject’s early life, “the picture is clear of a girl who was sensible, thoughtful and hard-working; a girl who had grown up in a deeply Christian family, who had given her life to God in her childhood, and in her adolescence had heard his call, supernatural and insistent.”
When Angela was about twenty, she became a Franciscan tertiary. Wearing the habit of the order, and following its rules as far as was possible for a person not living in community, Angela was able to receive communion weekly – something unusual in a day in which even nuns and religious brothers received only three times a year, and laypeople annually. All her life she took her association with the Franciscans seriously, obeying the directions of her Franciscan directors and incorporating Franciscan spirituality into the rule of the Confraternity which she would ultimately found.
At the beginning of her twenties Angela returned to the family home where she had grown up, remaining there for perhaps twenty years. She managed the family farm, sold its produce throughout the area, and gave religious instruction to the local families. She also came to be known to leading citizens of the wealthy city of Brescia, some twenty miles to the west, who came to Lake Garda for rest and recreation. Impressed by her deep piety and sound good sense, people came to her in growing numbers seeking spiritual counsel and advice in personal and family perplexities.
In 1516, when Angela was past forty, her Franciscan directors asked her to go to Brescia to console a wealthy widow, Catherine Patengola, who had recently lost her husband and two sons. Living in the Patengola family home, Angela came to know many of Brescia’s leading citizens, many of them members of the Confraternity of Divine Love, devoted to care of the sick and other good works. They maintained in Brescia a hospital for incurables (in the sixteenth century a euphemism for syphilis). Because members of the Confraternity kept their identity secret, like many members of Opus Dei today, it is impossible to say whether Angela was ever admitted to membership. But through the Confraternity she became acquainted to the spiritual elite of Brescia – and in time their leader.
Angela stayed only a few months with the widow Patengola. She moved from there to the house of a wealthy merchant, Antonio Romano, where she had greater privacy and more opportunity for the prayer that was at the heart of her life, supporting all her good works. She remained there until 1529, almost fourteen years. Romano testified later that Angela never slept in a bed, but always on a straw mat, which she laid on the ground and put away, rolled up, in a corner of the room. For a pillow she used a block of wood or a stone. “I never saw her eat meat,” Romano said. Her diet was mostly vegetables and fruit, with bread only twice a week. She never drank wine.
Another friend, who also gave Angela hospitality at times, testified in her process of canonization: “Angela received Holy Communion as often as she could, and remained in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament for several hours each morning. As she slept very little, she evidently spent much of the night also in prayer. She passed the rest of her day in active charity toward her neighbor or in prayer for herself or for sinners. In the time not devoted to works of charity, she was occupied in the reading of spiritual books.
“She was a great support to many people. They came to her, one for help to change his life or to bear some sorrow; another to draw up a will, others to decide on a marriage, or even to arrange the marriages of their sons and daughters; many came to her for advice, each according to his needs. She missed no opportunity of restoring peace, between husband and wife, between children and their parents, or between brothers. She did her best to counsel and console all of them. As her holiness grew day by day, so the fame of her sanctity gained ground among the people. Crowds of people in Brescia came to ask her prayers to obtain some favor from God; when disputes arose among the citizens, or even among the nobles, they turned to her for help. Her holiness became the talk of the neighboring towns.”
Angela was also visited by many priests and members of religious orders wanting to ask her about the meaning of scriptural passages. “All came away overawed at her gifts of interpretation,” one witness testifies. Another adds: “It seemed to me most wonderful that, without having studied Latin she understood it so well; and that, without formal teaching in the Holy Scriptures, she could speak of them in such a moving way … sometimes for an hour at a stretch.”
In 1524 Angela’s friend and host Antonio Romano told her that he was about to undertake the pilgrimage to Jerusalem which he had planned for years. At Angela’s request, he agreed to take her with him. They sailed on a ship from Venice the day after Corpus Christi. Underway Angela developed an eye infection which robbed her of almost all of her sight for the duration of the trip. She told friends afterwards that “when they led her from one holy place to the next in the course of the pilgrimage, she contemplated each with the eyes of her soul, just as though they were present to her physical sight.” Her companions on the pilgrimage were deeply impressed with Angela’s devotion. They could see that she was concentrated always on God.
After a homeward voyage fraught with dangers at sea and on land, Angela and Romano landed in November 1524 in Venice, where the authorities tried to enlist her as leader of their own hospital for incurables. Angela insisted, however, that her place was in Brescia.
When the reigning Pope Clement VII proclaimed the following year 1525 a Holy Year, Angela resolved to go there on pilgrimage. A priest at the papal court who had come to know her in Palestine arranged a private audience with the Pope. Deeply impressed with her, Clement tried to persuade Angela to remain at Rome – an appeal which had no more success, however, than that made to her by the authorities in Venice the year before.
It was another decade before Angela, now well into her sixties and feeling her age, after a grave illness which had caused her friends for a time to despair of her life, felt empowered by God to embark on the work for which she had been preparing ever since the vision she had experienced in adolescence: the founding of the Confraternity of St. Ursula. They were to be women living not in a convent but at home, and totally devoted both to prayer and to good works.
On November 25th, 1535, the feast of St. Catherine of Alexandria and the eleventh anniversary of Angela’s return to Brescia from the Holy Land, Angela attended Mass with twenty-eight companions, all of them women under her spiritual direction. Together they signed the “Book of the Confraternity,” giving themselves to God for the service of his people. Eighteen months later they chose Angela as their first superior.
It is difficult for us today to realize how revolutionary Angela’s foundation was in the sixteenth century. The idea of women consecrated to virginity, yet not living in a convent, was considered scandalous in Angela’s day. While she lived, her personality and evident sanctity carried the day. Thereafter opposition to her novel idea became open, with leading churchmen, such as the saintly Charles Borromeo, cardinal archbishop of Milan, insisting that Angela’s Confraternity of St. Ursula conform to the only model of religious life then considered appropriate for consecrated women, by living secluded in convents. This they did, so that by the beginning of the eighteenth century the Ursuline order counted some twenty congregations with 350 convents and between 15,000 and 20,000 nuns. The Ursulines were especially numerous in France, coming from there to Canada and the United States, working especially as teachers in Catholic schools.
Angela had envisaged something different. What actually developed was a great blessing to the Church nonetheless. Without this army of dedicated women, the history of the Catholic Church in North America would look very different. And the seed which Angela had sown would not die – even if would take another five centuries for the Church to recognize her unique vision: that the Lord could call women to be both contemplatives and active servants of God’s people in ordinary worldly life.
Angela predicted the day of her death: on the 27th of January 1540. “Her funeral turned into a triumph,” Sister Ledochowska writes. “The woman whose humility led her to refuse to sign the text of her Rule was more honored in her death than the great folk of the world.”
Angela’s longtime secretary, Fr. Gabriele Cozzano, wrote years later: “Among her companions she was like the sun, shining and giving light to all; or like a glowing fire of love, which set them on fire also … Divinely inspired as she was, she became the sole Foundress of this great work; she was its true and living mother; for in the word of Truth and the Blood of Christ, she caused her daughters to be born again. Yet in the Preface [to her Rule] which she made me write, she wanted to be put on the same level as the rest, and in her humility, asked me not to mention her name.”
At the conclusion of her biography Sister Ledochowska mentions Angela’s ability to discern the signs of the times. “A peasant woman without education, or rather self-educated, she saw into the future and not only had no fear of innovation but understood how reform and renewal of the church were to be brought about. ‘Follow the old way,’ she said. ‘But lead a new life.’” This message, central in the life of Angela Merici, is timeless.
