Saint Magdalene of Canossa

That young woman was Magdalene Gabriella of Canossa, daughter of one of the most illustrious lines of marquises in Italy.

She is the founder of the Canossian Daughters of Charity and the Canossian Sons of Charity, who bear witness to “the love of the Cross, greater than every other love”.

Yet silk could not shield her from tragedy: when Magdalene was only five, her father died suddenly on a holiday trip. Two years later, her mother married another nobleman, leaving her five young children at the Canossa palace to be raised by tutors.

Being abandoned by her own mother left a wound that bled throughout Magdalene’s childhood. On top of that, the French governess hired to care for her was a domineering, harsh woman who often mistreated, humiliated and slandered the girl.

At fifteen, Magdalene caught a dangerous case of smallpox along with a respiratory infection, which caused her great pain and left her in fragile health for the rest of her life.

Later, when she had become mother to thousands of abandoned children, Magdalene would often remind her sisters that no one understands the pain of a child without a mother better than someone who has known it herself. The wound of her childhood, instead of becoming a prison for her soul, became the door through which she reached the hearts of the very orphans she would spend the rest of her life loving.

Every time she rode in her carriage through San Zeno, the poorest quarter of the city, it cut Magdalene to the heart. It was an ancient district that had grown up around an early Christian cemetery from Roman times, where the remains of Saint Zeno, the first bishop of Verona, had been buried since the beginning of the ninth century. She began secretly taking money, food and clothing from the palace to give away. In 1799 she took in her first two homeless orphan girls.

Yet handouts could not cure the problem at its roots: the poor needed schooling, a trade to stand on their own feet, and above all, to know that God loves them with all His heart.

Magdalene realized that alms, however generous, were only a temporary painkiller for a much deeper social disease. She began taking time to sit and talk with each child, asking about their family circumstances, and gradually a larger plan took shape in her mind: not only to feed them, but to teach them, so that when they grew up these children could stand on their own two feet, no longer living on others’ pity.

The Canossa family fiercely opposed what she was doing. They thought it a stain on the family’s honor for a marchioness of her rank to mix with the filthy lower classes. Some even thought she had lost her mind.

Empty-handed, she walked out of the palace gate and went on foot to the most squalid slum of Verona, San Zeno. There she rented an old abandoned convent named for Saint Joseph and, with a few poor young women, began a consecrated life.

The former marchioness put on a coarse dark brown habit, with a small metal cross around her neck. Every day she herself swept the house, begged for food, cooked soup for the orphans, washed sick people covered in sores and taught poor girls their letters with her own hands.

She opened free schools and workshops teaching sewing and embroidery, and set up groups of traveling catechists to go to remote rural areas.

In 1810, when Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte came to inspect the city of Verona and heard of the holiness of the Marchioness of Canossa, he personally came to visit her charitable house. Impressed by what he saw, Napoleon signed a decree giving the whole convent of Saint Joseph to her community for its work.

She gave her sisters a motto for life:

“Make Jesus known and loved!”

She also told them: “The love of Jesus is a fire that cannot be contained; it must blaze up and spread to the very ends of the earth!”

Her work of charity quickly spread throughout northern Italy: Canossian convents and schools sprang up in Venice, Milan, Bergamo and Trent. She was always present in the hardest places, traveling in rattling carriages in the snowy winter and eating the plainest food of the poor.

In 1831, seeing the urgent needs of boys and young men, she also founded the Canossian Sons of Charity in Venice.

However busy she was, she kept a deep inner silence. Night after night she was seen kneeling for hours before the Eucharist, taking refuge in the heart of Our Lady of Sorrows to draw strength. She taught her sisters:

“Serve the poor with boundless tenderness, and never make them feel they owe you anything!”

In Lent 1835, Mother Magdalene of Canossa fell gravely ill in Verona. Lying on a simple wooden bed in her poor convent, not far from the splendid palace where she had been born and which she had given up, she calmly accepted approaching death.

Pope Pius XII beatified her in 1941, and on October 2, 1988, Pope John Paul II solemnly canonized Magdalene of Canossa. The Church celebrates her on April 10 each year; the Canossians celebrate on May 8.

In Vietnam and throughout the mission lands of Asia, the Canossian Sisters are much loved for their kindergartens, hostels for poor female students, charity classes and care of the sick poor.