Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin

Anna Francesca Boscardin was born in Brendola, in the province of Vicenza, on October 6, 1888, into a peasant family. In the village they called her Annette. She went to school very little, because she had to help at home and in the fields, and she worked as a housemaid. No one thought she was smart: she was slow, and she was teased for it. A local priest called her “goose,” and the nickname stuck to her for years. At sixteen she asked to join the Sisters of Saint Dorothy in Vicenza. They accepted her and put her in the kitchen washing dishes and peeling potatoes, because that seemed the only thing she could do. She took the name Maria Bertilla. Then they sent her to work as a nurse at the hospital in Treviso, in the ward for children with diphtheria — the one where nobody wanted to go, because people died there. During the Great War, Treviso was bombed. The sisters were evacuated, and she stayed with the patients who couldn’t be moved, through the bombings, for months. The soldiers who passed through called her “the angel of the ward.” She died in Treviso on October 20, 1922, at thirty-four, of a tumor she had been living with for some time. John XXIII declared her a saint in 1961, and among those present in St. Peter’s Square were some of the children she had cared for, now grown men. If your name is Bertilla, today is your name day.