Saint Bartolomea Capitanio

She was born at Lovere on January 13, 1807, to Modesto Capitanio and Caterina Canossi, in a town that belonged to the province of Bergamo and the diocese of Brescia. ²⁴ After elementary school she was sent at eleven to the Poor Clares of the town, who had just returned to their convent after being dispersed under Napoleon. ⁴ Giacomo Drago, writing for santiebeati.it, credits the abbess, Sister Francesca Parpani, a cultivated and devout woman, with her progress both in study and in the spiritual life. ⁴

Pius XII, at her canonization, described her as quick, lively and vehement by nature, a temperament she set herself to master from childhood. ³ He also told a domestic story: that her gentle way of speaking and acting brought her father back from the tavern and from gambling, which he loved too much, to Christian thrift and honesty (our summary of the Latin). ³

She left the convent school with something more definite than a teaching certificate. Her congregation says she came out, at seventeen, consecrated to God by a vow of virginity and fixed in her resolution, in its English, to become "a saint, a great saint, a saint soon". ⁵⁷

She qualified as an assistant teacher in 1822 and began teaching the youngest pupils at the convent school itself. ²⁴ Drago says she left the boarding school on July 18, 1824, went home, and the following year opened a small school in her own house for poor girls, where she worked out a method of her own. ⁴ The same year, 1824, she wrote the first outline of a rule of life and took a vow of obedience by which she bound herself above all to carry out the orders of her father, who had put her to work in the family shop. ⁴

Her attention soon went to the young women of the town, among whom, Drago writes, the ideas of the Revolution had left marks of moral disorientation. ⁴ She organized an oratory for them, with a chapel, rules and instruction. ⁴ The congregation's reading for the founders' feast describes the range of it: she befriended the young, especially the neediest, advised the leaders of oratories in the villages nearby, helped the priests, sought out the poorest, and wrote letters, methods of life and rules for associations (our translation). ⁷

She also worked in the small hospital for the poor at Lovere, founded by the sisters Caterina and Rosa Gerosa, where she was asked to serve as director and bursar. ²⁴ There and in the oratory she worked alongside Caterina Gerosa, more than twenty years older than she was, whose family were prosperous leather merchants and had paid for the hospital. ⁵⁷

Drago says she could see, beyond the narrow bounds of Lovere, a great many people in need of religious, moral and physical help, and conceived the idea of a religious family that would sanctify its members through the works of mercy. ⁴ Pius XII listed the works she meant it to do: to educate girls, to care for the sick in hospitals in soul and body, to give a refuge to the poor elderly and a home to the abandoned, and to comfort the wretched and afflicted as far as it could (our summary of the Latin). ³

During a retreat at Sellere in 1829 she wrote the rules of the new foundation. ²⁴ The congregation calls this text its Foundation Document and says it describes an institute "totally founded on charity", after the examples left by "our most lovable Redeemer", to care for the young, look after the sick and take an active part in the life of the local Church. ⁶ Its reading for the feast adds that she herself humbly called these papers her Promemoria, her reminders. ⁷

She also won over Caterina Gerosa, who did not want it. ²⁵ The congregation says Caterina was "at first dismayed and against the idea" of her friend's proposal before giving herself to it wholeheartedly as the will of God. ⁵ Pius XII, speaking of Bartolomea, said that she claimed no strength of her own, and applied to her Paul's words, "I can do all things in him who strengthens me." ³

Finding and buying a house was hard, Drago says, with obstacles from relatives, from the authorities and from lack of money. ⁴ In November 1832 the contract was signed for the Casa Gaia, an old, abandoned building, and on the morning of November 21, in the presence of the two founders, the parish priest of Lovere, Don Angelo Bosio, relatives and friends, the institute was formally begun. ⁴⁶ The people of Lovere called the house the "Conventino," the little convent; for Bartolomea, in the congregation's English, it was "the beloved house of charity". ⁴⁶

The works she had already begun moved into it: a free school for the daughters of ordinary people, an orphanage with ten girls, Sunday gatherings, pious unions, and help for anyone who came looking for it. ⁴ On June 22, 1833, the two women signed a legal agreement in fourteen articles uniting them as a society, which the Austrian government recognized. ⁴

A month later she was dead. She died at Lovere on July 26, 1833, of tuberculosis. ¹⁴ The Martyrology says she was twenty-seven; by the dates every source gives, she was twenty-six. ¹²⁴ Pius XII, in the homily, compared her to a white lily cut down in the flower of her youth, and the institute, still a sapling without roots, seemed to him to have been destined to die with her. ³

It did not die. Caterina Gerosa, who took the name Vincenza at her profession, led the institute until her own death in 1847. ⁵ Drago lists the steps that followed: the first sisters received the habit on November 21, 1835, and Vincenza was elected superior; the Holy See approved the institute on June 29, 1840, and the court at Vienna in February 1841; the first house in Milan opened in 1842; and on February 7, 1860, the first four missionary sisters left for Bengal. ⁴ The congregation's own history adds Buenos Aires in 1909 and Africa from 1959, and gives its largest size as 8,941 members in 640 communities in 1964. ⁸

The congregation also names a third person among its founders, Don Angelo Bosio, her spiritual director, who encouraged the project from the start, guided the institute for its first thirty years and began the process for her canonization. ⁵ Pius IX declared her venerable on March 8, 1866; Pius XI beatified her on May 30, 1926; and Pius XII canonized her with Vincenza Gerosa on May 18, 1950. ⁴⁵ The congregation quotes the two founders' own summary: "The undertaking is of the Lord," Bartolomea insisted, and Caterina answered, "He is its author." ⁵

No source read for this page names her patron of any group or cause. santiebeati.it lists her as patron of Lovere, her town, where she lived and died. ⁴ Her work was teaching girls and caring for the poor and the sick, and her congregation carries it on in schools, hospitals and parishes, but none of the sources makes that a patronage. ⁴⁸

Saint Bartolomea Capitanio's feast is July 26, the day of her death. The Roman Martyrology lists her that day, and the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives July 26 as her memorial. ¹² Pius XII's decree of canonization had assigned her memorial to July 27. ³

Her congregation celebrates her together with Vincenza Gerosa on May 18, the anniversary of their canonization, which its own Mass reading ranks as a solemnity; Drago's page says the dioceses of Brescia, Bergamo and Milan keep that date as well. ⁴⁷ The same page also gives April 28 in one sentence, which no other source supports. ⁴

She had a short working life, eleven years from her teaching certificate to her death, and she spent it in a small town: a schoolroom in her father's house, an oratory, a hospital ward and, at the end, an old house bought in spite of her relatives, the authorities and a lack of money. ⁴ The institute she planned reached Bengal within thirty years of her death. ⁴⁸

What the sources remember of her is mostly energy and resolve, the girl who wanted to be "a saint, a great saint, a saint soon". ⁵ Pius XII put the weight elsewhere, on a temperament she disciplined and on a trust that did not rest on her own strength. ³

She did not see the institute survive, and it nearly did not. ³⁴ It lasted because an older, more hesitant woman, who had not wanted to found anything, agreed to go on with it. ⁵ The congregation names both of them, and their director, as its founders, and says the work was the Lord's. ⁵