Saint Maria Francesca of Jesus Rubatto

Saint Maria Francesca of Jesus, born Anna Maria Rubatto, came from Piedmont. At the age of forty she founded the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters of Loano and led them to Latin America. She died in Montevideo and is the first saint of Uruguay. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on August 6, the day of her death.

She was born on February 14, 1844, in Carmagnola near Turin. She lost her father at the age of four and her mother at nineteen. She then settled in Turin as a lady’s companion to the noblewoman Marianna Scoffone and helped her manage her estate. She taught catechism, visited the sick at the Cottolengo institute, and helped at the oratory of Saint John Bosco.

In the summer of 1883, after Mrs. Scoffone’s death, she was taking a cure at Loano in Liguria. Coming out of church, she tended a young laborer who had been hurt by a stone that fell from a scaffold. The house under construction was meant for a community of women for which a director was being sought, and the Capuchin Angelico Martini judged that Anna Maria was suited to the task. The proposal surprised her, since her life was already settled. After long prayer and conversations with her spiritual director and with Saint John Bosco, she agreed.

The congregation was born on January 23, 1885, when five women began a common life at Loano; since 1973 it has been called the Capuchin Sisters of Mother Rubatto. Anna Maria took the name Maria Francesca of Jesus and, at the behest of the archbishop of Genoa, became the first superior. She told her sisters that they were all servants of the poor and must render them every kind of service. The congregation served above all the sick in their homes. John Paul II recalled that she wanted the Eucharist to be the heart of her religious family.

In 1892 she took her sisters to Montevideo in Uruguay, and soon also to Argentina and Brazil. She crossed the ocean seven times to visit her communities. In 1899 she opened a house at the Capuchin mission in Alto Alegre in northern Brazil. A year and a half after the sisters arrived, on March 13, 1901, all seven were killed at the hands of indigenous people, together with four Capuchins, two tertiaries, and more than two hundred faithful. Mother Francesca suffered deeply, but she did not abandon the work.

In 1902 she sailed again from Genoa to Montevideo. A visit meant to last a few weeks stretched to two years. Appendicitis was followed by blood poisoning, which she bore patiently. She died in Montevideo on August 6, 1904, and in keeping with her wishes was buried there.

John Paul II beatified her in Rome on October 10, 1993. The miracle accepted for her canonization was the recovery of a young man from a severe head injury in the Uruguayan town of Colonia in 2000. Pope Francis canonized her on May 15, 2022, in Saint Peter’s Square, together with Titus Brandsma, Charles de Foucauld, and seven other blesseds.