Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin

Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin was an Italian religious of the Congregation of the Sisters Teachers of Saint Dorothy, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts, and a nurse at the hospital of Treviso. Her life was spent in hiddenness, in the daily service of the sick. The Church commemorates her on October 20, the day of her death.

She was born on October 6, 1888, in Brendola near Vicenza, into a poor farming family. At baptism she received the names Anna Francesca. The home was not free of troubles: her mother, a woman of deep faith, suffered much from her husband, and Saint John XXIII recalled that tears often accompanied the childhood of the future saint. She attended school for only three years, because learning came hard to her and the family was poor. She worked in the fields and at home, and while still a child she went into service in other people’s houses.

Her favorite book was the catechism, a gift from her parish priest; she read it again and again and taught her peers from it. In 1905, on his advice, she entered the Sisters of Saint Dorothy in Vicenza and took the names Maria Bertilla. She was thought to have little ability, so she was given the simplest and heaviest tasks. She called her own way to God “the way of the carts, the most ordinary one.” She made her religious vows on December 8, 1907.

As a novice she was sent to the hospital of Treviso, and she returned there after her vows. At first she worked in the kitchen; then, out of necessity, she was assigned to children sick with diphtheria. To the surprise of the sisters and the doctors, she proved to be a skillful, calm, and tireless nurse. She watched over the sick day and night, and in caring for the body she also remembered the soul. At the age of 22 she herself underwent surgery for a tumor and returned to work.

During the First World War wounded soldiers were brought to the hospital, and Treviso was bombed from the air. Sister Bertilla did not leave the sick and gave them courage. When the front drew near, she left with the patients for Viggiù in Lombardy, where she nursed soldiers with lung diseases. The superior there judged her unfairly and sent her to wash the soldiers’ clothing. She accepted this without objection. In 1919 she was called back to Vicenza, and five months later she returned to Treviso, to the sick children.

The illness she had long concealed returned. The doctors diagnosed a malignant tumor, but surgery no longer brought improvement. Sister Bertilla died in Treviso on October 20, 1922, at the age of 34. Pius XII recounted that in the pocket of her worn habit was found a tattered catechism, which she had kept with her until death. The faithful began to come in great numbers to her grave in Treviso.

Pope Pius XII beatified her on June 8, 1952, and Saint John XXIII canonized her on May 11, 1961, on the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord. He said then that her greatness comes from humility, from sacrifice hidden from human eyes, and from the simplicity that is born of trusting abandonment to God. The saint’s relics rest in Vicenza, in the motherhouse of her congregation.