Angela Merici – 1470 -1540
Do you see her as a woman of contradiction? She wanted consecrated life but did not want a convent or a monastery. She was certainly ahead of her time, a farsighted woman blessed with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
She was a woman who told her followers ‘Act, Bestir Yourself’ yet took forty years to take action herself. Only God knows why she waited so long, but there is an appointed time for everything, and God’s time is the best time.
She was a woman who did not found a religious congregation yet is regarded as foundress of the Ursulines. So many claim her as their Foundress, a woman of great spiritual depth, a woman who loved God above all and would want all her daughters to have that same grace to love Christ, our only Treasure.
She was a woman who never taught yet is regarded as a great educator. The finest Ursuline colleges today continue to mould and to nurture real women with a zest for life, for truth and for freedom.
Yes, one could also say that Angela was a simple 16th century woman from Northern Italy – Desenzano and Brescia. Her life was a pilgrim journey for a way to fulfil God’s plan for her.
Her search began when her family life experience planted a seed of desire for God. It was fuelled by two profound spiritual experiences in her early life. The first – an understanding of the eternal peace being enjoyed by her beloved, recently deceased, sister – left her with profound faith in a God whose ‘dazzling face…contents every afflicted heart.’ The second experience showed her that she, and others like her, were to live a consecrated lives ‘in the world’. This was so totally out of the ordinary pattern of life for women of her day that Angela hesitated.
She became a Franciscan tertiary, went on pilgrimages seeking clarity, confirmation, courage – who knows what? She grew in wisdom, wholeness, and love, becoming well known as reconciler and peacemaker. Angela says ‘be gentle and compassionate…for you will achieve more with loving kindness and gentleness than with harshness and rebukes’. She urges ‘if you see one faint-hearted and timid and inclined to despondency, comfort her, encourage her…lift her heart with every consolation.’ This spirit of hers underpins the educational philosophy of Ursuline educators the world over.
Angela gradually found others who wanted to live a lifestyle similar to her own. They met together – prayed, dreamed and planned. It seemed to her ‘an astonishing dignity’ that God should invite them into profound mystical, spousal relationship and trust them to live it in the midst of the distractions of the world. Together, the first group committed themselves to the Rule of the Company of St. Ursula on November 25, 1535, five years before Angela’s death.
Following the Council of Trent many of Angela’s followers began teaching Christian Doctrine. Later in France some synthesised Angela’s followers’ educational ministry, Angela’s spirit and the lifestyle of religious. Thus the Ursuline Congregation emerged. Most of Angela’s followers today belong to this ‘branch’. Angela’s vision of a new way of being consecrated virtually vanished, except in Italy where her followers have been faithful to the original model. It is now being revived in as many as twenty countries like Canada, Africa, Eastern Europe, Indonesia, and Brazil.
The Holiness of Angela Merici as read by Maria Rosa Zamboni, a Member of a Secular Institute
Introduction – As a Brescian, I was not interested in the “half sisters” as the Daughters of Angela were known when I was young. Only later did I realize that Angela had created a road through history, that she wrote a fundamental page for the Church.
What sort of Prophecy…. should characterize a secular institute?
- Angela created a new form of existence for women in the Church. The Company of St. Ursula was born in the process of promoting women, breaking with the structures of the time.
- The Church is reformed by a return to origins.
- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) on prophecy:
+In friendship with God, search for God’s will, to see the history of God and God in history. +To proclaim God’s will fearlessly in this moment of history +To return always to Christ
- In relationship with the world we are to be a sacrament of the living God, making visible the love of Christ, the fatherhood of God.
+Rooted in the world +Rooted in Christ +Proclaiming the possibility of Gospel living according to the Beatitudes, realized in ordinary daily life +In the heart of the world and of life
Spirituality is….
- A tension of “ands”: already and not yet, amid the dualism that would divide and diminish the body, human history, etc., as unworthy.
- Angela: to be in the world seemed an opportunity, a positive, a place to realize one’s vocation
- Life in the Spirit
- Always on the way, open (We never “arrive.”)
- Integrating all life forces around a living center
- Angela: prayer involving the senses, words, thoughts….
- Essential elements of spirituality:
+Open to the Spirit’s action, for direction, in trust, with dependence +Interiority: recollection, silence, depth, fidelity to a great plan in the simplest situations; able to choose the essential things +Dailiness: lived with greatness – not great things but with great spirit and great love; every instant of life is saved +Solitude, amid family, work, society, the great and terrible experience of Christian freedom +Feet on the ground: connected to reality, to the world thirsty for spirituality +Communion: to be bridge-builders, experts in dialogue +In the presence of others, not remote or idealized, lived in praxis
- Consequences
+Normality, especially in our relationships +Tenderness, joy, compassion, trust, service, prayer, search for God’s will +A dynamic that moves from contemplation to action and from action to contemplation +Face turned toward the other
The following of Jesus…
- Joining consecration and secularity, we learn to walk through Creation with its Author, recognizing his creativity in the school of the Son.
- A joy, life and courage; images of bread, water and friendship
- The logic of gift and of service that exalt the human potential
- A solidarity with the people of our time
- Angela: seeking not so much to apply ascetic practices to life’s situations. Rather, she sought to discover the value that virginity, poverty and obedience assume inside concrete experience.
+Total dedication +Espousal — a nucleus of Merician spirituality, a life of intimacy and witness
…in Obedience (It’s interesting that the Rule puts it first.)
- Jesus, model of doing God’s will
+ Cana — manifesting God’s providence + Deeds that demonstrate the demands of salvation + Constant availability to the neighbor, especially the marginalized and excluded +Transformation into a “new life”
- Putting on “the mind of Christ”
+Not passive +Not simple assent to commands +Not pious self-renunciation +Comes from within things and events +Comes from love given and received +Creative +Guided by Scripture +Helped by the community to “decipher” God’s will +Developed in prayer, in listening to the word, and in renewal
…in Virginity
- Bonhoeffer: Chastity requires complete orientation of one’s life toward an end. (For him, it was to love unto death.)
- Angela: Virginity is an invitation to charity, to the fullness of love.
+ It renders one free. + The spouse loves all who are loved by her Spouse. + Strong links between virginity and charity + A heart undivided, transparent, free (In an era of forced monasticism, she insisted on freedom.) + Sacred as a gift from God, by grace
- A life-orientation
+ Like the pearl of great price, the treasure found in the field + Embraces all of one’s existence and gives it direction + John reclining on Jesus’ breast at the Last Supper and standing with him on Calvary is an icon of the intimacy of the disciple with the Lord. + A life of relationship + Results: a free heart, joy, happiness
…in Poverty
- Angela: like Jesus in his Passion, his complete poverty, stripped of all strength, of dreams, of all human powers
- To live in the mode of gift
- To work for the resources to live in dignity and to enjoy beauty and the Creator’s gifts
- To be conformed to Christ in the use of goods (In the West resources are often seen as a sign of God’s approval, justifying what people are doing.)
+ In the context of society + In the conditions of one’s profession, family, territory
- Earth belongs to God, we are its stewards
+ Not just a matter of renunciation + The logic of the Reign of God: sharing, communion, justice, solidarity
