Saint Angela Merici

Angela Merici was born in Desenzano, on Lake Garda, in 1474, and was orphaned at ten. Then her sister also died suddenly, without having received the last sacraments, and for a girl of the fifteenth century that was an unbearable thought: she prayed for a long time to be told where her sister had gone. Back in her father’s house at twenty, she got an idea into her head that had almost no precedent at the time: that the greatest need of her age was **to educate girls**. Not to preach, not to found convents: to teach little girls. She turned the house into a school and began gathering the girls of Desenzano there to teach them the basics of religion. It worked so well that she was called to Brescia to start another one, and in 1516 she moved there. From that insight came the Company of Saint Ursula — the Ursulines — that is, an association of women devoted to the religious education of young girls. It was a new form, and a bold one for its time. In 1524, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she suddenly went blind on Crete. She didn’t turn back: she continued the journey and visited the holy places without seeing them. She regained her sight on the way home, at the same spot where she had lost it. In the holy year of 1525 Pope Clement VII, who had heard about her, invited her to stay in Rome: she shied away from the attention and went back to her work. She died in Brescia on January 27, 1540. If your name is Angela, you celebrate today too — it’s the second day of the month for this name, after Angela of Foligno on the 4th. A woman who decided five hundred years ago that girls should get an education. The rest followed.