Saint Paola Elisabetta Cerioli

Saint Paola Elisabetta Cerioli was a wife and mother from Lombardy who, after losing all her children and her husband, gave her wealth and her strength to poor country children and orphans, and founded the Institute of the Holy Family for them. She was born on January 28, 1816, in Soncino, in the province of Cremona, and died in 1865 in Comonte near Bergamo. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on December 24.

Her name was Costanza Cerioli. She was the youngest of sixteen children in a wealthy noble family and was in frail health from birth. At the age of eleven she was sent for almost five years to the school of the Visitation Sisters in Alzano Lombardo, run in the spirit of Saint Francis de Sales. Far from home she suffered from loneliness, and it was then that she learned to seek her support in God.

In 1835 the nineteen-year-old Costanza married in accordance with her parents’ wishes. Her husband was Gaetano Busecchi-Tassis, a widower close to sixty years old, from Comonte. The marriage lasted nineteen years and was not easy. She gave birth to four children; three died very early, and her son Carlo lived to the age of sixteen. As he lay dying in January 1854, he asked his mother not to weep, because God would give her many other children. On Christmas Day of the same year her husband died as well.

The thirty-eight-year-old widow went through a deep crisis. Her spiritual guides were the Bishop of Bergamo, Pietro Luigi Speranza, and his auxiliary bishop, Alessandro Valsecchi. Meditating on the sorrow of Mary at the foot of the Cross, she understood that her motherhood could continue in a new way. She began to visit the sick and to share her wealth with the poor, and she took two orphaned girls into her mansion in Comonte. Her relatives and acquaintances were against it; people said that suffering had cost her her reason.

On Christmas Day 1856 she made a perpetual vow of chastity, and on February 8, 1857, the vows of poverty and obedience. When other women joined her, on December 8, 1857, she founded the Institute of the Sisters of the Holy Family in Comonte and took the name Paola Elisabetta. On November 4, 1863, in Villacampagna, she began the male branch, the Congregation of the Fathers and Brothers of the Holy Family. Both communities were to bring up and teach orphans and the children of the poorest farmers.

She made the Holy Family of Nazareth the model for her houses and entrusted the work to the protection of Saint Joseph. She called the children in her care sons and daughters of Saint Joseph and held that they took the place of her son Carlo. She would tell the sisters again and again that they were to be for the orphans the father, the mother, and the brothers and sisters whom God had taken from them.

She died unexpectedly at her home in Comonte on December 24, 1865, at the age of forty-nine, when both institutes had only just begun their work. Pope Pius XII beatified her on March 19, 1950, and John Paul II canonized her on May 16, 2004, in Saint Peter’s Square. He said then that she had been convinced that children, in order to grow up secure and strong, need a family that is healthy and united, generous and stable.