St Angela Merici was a Italian Franciscan tertiary who founded the Ursulines, one of the largest teaching orders in the Catholic Church.
She came from a family of farmers on her father’s side and lesser nobility on her mother’s, born the fifth of sixth children in Desenzano in about 1474. Four of her siblings died young and they were soon followed by both of her parents, at which point Angela went to live with the family of an uncle on the bank on Lake Como.
Even a child she was pious, with a devotion to St Ursula, whom she saw in a vision with a great crowd of virgins and saints coming down from heaven to her. They included a dead sister, who invited her to form a “company of virgins”, which is precisely what she went on to do in later life.
As a Franciscan tertiary, St Angela formed a group of women around her, some of whom were also tertiaries like herself, dedicated to the care and support of unmarried girls in the Desenzano area. Butler’s Lives of the Saints recalls that because the venture flourished the group was invited to extend its work to the larger city of Brescia, which had been ravaged by some 20 years of fighting between the French, Venetians and Spanish, and the massacre of many of its inhabitants.
After five years in Brescia, St Angela made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land but suddenly became blind while in Crete. During her pilgrimage she relied on friends to describe the places to her. Mysteriously, she recovered her sight on her return journey in the same spot that she had lost it.
By this time, her reputation for holiness was spreading and she was received in audience by Pope Clement VII and invited to move to Rome but St Angela believed her vocation was to meet the local needs of the women of Brescia.
Opportunities for women in 16th century Italy were few and those who did not marry often entered religious life or ended up in menial service or even prostitution.
St Angela and her companions sought to recreate the “social class of virgins” witnessed in the early Church, a company of woman who sought to relate to Our Lord from their own volition and not from the failure to find a husband.
Prospective members of the company were admitted only if they had chosen freely to enter. Initally, they continued to live with their own families while observing a rule St Angela had composed, meeting together for instruction, but split into groups under the command of a “virgin mistress”, usually an older woman responsible for the physical, economic and moral welfare of the virgins.
St Angela and some of her companions eventually moved together to a house near the Church of St Afra in Brescia on 25 November 1535, a date which is generally seen as the foundation of the first Ursuline congregation. They called themselves “the Company of St Ursula” after the patroness of medieval universities and within four years the community had grown to 28 sisters.
St Angela was a woman of prayer who led an evangelical way of life and who offered a creative contemporary response to the needs of women in the Church.
One of her objectives was the sanctification of family life through the Christian education of future wives and mothers.
But she wanted the virgins of her order to be consecrated to God and dedicated to the service of their neighbour while living a celibate life in their own homes. The virgins wore no special habit and took no formal vows, although the early rule prescribed virginity, poverty and obedience. On 18 March 1537, St Angela was elected “Mother and Mistress”, the superior of the order, and by the time she died in Brescia on 27 January 1540 there were 24 branches of the order serving the Church.
Her body was clothed in the habit of a Franciscan tertiary and interred in the Church of St Afra, Brescia, close to the tombs of the Brescian martyrs to whom she was strongly devoted during her lifetime.
Papal approval for the order came in 1544, but not without controversy: it was opposed by some aristocrats who accused the Ursulines of trying to lure away marriageable daughters from valuable political alliances.
Saint Angela Merici was beatified in Rome on 30 April 1768 by Pope Clement XIII and was canonised by Pope Pius VII on 24 May 1807.
During the Second World War, the Church of St Afra and her tomb within it were completely destroyed by Allied bombers during an air raid of 2 March 1945.