Saint Rose Venerini

Saint Rose Venerini of Viterbo devoted her life to the education of girls and gave rise to the Religious Teachers Venerini (Maestre Pie Venerini). The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on May 7, the anniversary of her death, as the one who opened the first schools in Italy for girls.

She was born in Viterbo on February 9, 1656, one of the four children of the physician Goffredo Venerini and Marzia Zampichetti. According to her first biographer, the Jesuit Girolamo Andreucci, at the age of seven she made a vow to consecrate her life to God. In her youth she was torn between the attractions of the world and the promise she had made. When a young man who had sought her hand died unexpectedly, she understood how everything passes away and gave herself entirely to Christ.

In the fall of 1676, with her father’s consent, she went to live in the Dominican monastery of Saint Catherine in Viterbo to discern her vocation. After a few months the untimely death of her father forced her to return home and care for her mother, and soon her brother and her mother died as well. From 1684 she invited girls and women of the neighborhood to her home to pray the Rosary together, and seeing how little they knew of the truths of the faith, she began to teach them. Her spiritual director, the Jesuit Ignazio Martinelli, after long prayer concluded that her path was teaching girls, not the cloister.

On August 30, 1685, with the approval of the bishop of Viterbo, Cardinal Urbano Sacchetti, she and two companions opened a school where poor girls learned, free of charge, the truths of the faith, reading, and household skills. This was how the Religious Teachers began. Benedict XVI stressed that Rose did not stop at educating the girls but cared for their complete formation, grounded in the teaching of the Church.

From 1692 to 1694, at the invitation of Cardinal Marco Antonio Barbarigo, bishop of Montefiascone, she opened about ten schools in Montefiascone and in the towns around Lake Bolsena. She entrusted their direction to her pupil, the future Saint Lucy Filippini. She founded schools in other places too, often in the face of opposition: according to the letter of beatification, someone shot at the teachers and set fire to their house.

In 1706 she came to Rome, but her first attempt failed. Only in 1713 did she open a school in the center of the city, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. On October 24, 1716, Pope Clement XI visited her and, as has been handed down, told her that she was doing what he himself could not do. She liked to say that she was so bound to the will of God that neither death nor life mattered to her: she wanted to live as long as God willed and to serve him as it pleased him, and nothing more.

She died in Rome on the evening of May 7, 1728, leaving more than forty schools. She was buried in the Church of the Gesù in Rome. Pius XII beatified her on May 4, 1952, and Benedict XVI canonized her on October 15, 2006, in Saint Peter’s Square.