Saint Lucy Filippini

She was born on January 13, 1672, at Corneto, the town now called Tarquinia. ¹³ Her mother died before Lucy was a year old and was buried in the church of San Marco; her father died six years later and was buried in Santa Margherita. ¹ The orphan went to live with an aunt and uncle. ¹

The Religious Teachers Filippini, who keep her memory, describe a serious child who built little altars and prayed at them, and who often went to the nearby Benedictine monastery of Santa Lucia, where she made her First Communion. ¹ The New Catholic Encyclopedia adds that as a child she helped her pastor teach the catechism. ³

Cardinal Marcantonio Barbarigo was bishop of Montefiascone and of Corneto. ⁹ The Filippini say his first pastoral visit to Corneto made a lasting impression on her and that she followed him to Montefiascone. ¹ The sources tell her preparation differently. The New Catholic Encyclopedia says that when she was sixteen the cardinal sent her to a monastery of nuns, where she stayed under his guidance until 1692. ³ Vatican News names it as the monastery of Santa Chiara at Montefiascone. ⁶ Catholic.net says he persuaded her to come and work at an institute for training teachers that he had founded and placed under religious. ⁵

Barbarigo had already opened a seminary for his priests. ¹ According to the Filippini his next step was schools for girls, particularly the daughters of the poor, because he saw in them the hope of Christian family life. ¹ They taught domestic arts, weaving and embroidery as well as reading and Christian doctrine; the Filippini call the teaching of reading and writing to the poor a revolutionary step for the time. ¹²

The schools did not begin with her, and the sources weigh that differently. The Holy See's biography of Saint Rose Venerini, who had opened a school for girls at Viterbo in 1685, says Barbarigo called Venerini to his diocese, where between 1692 and 1694 she opened ten schools in Montefiascone and the villages around Lake Bolsena, with the cardinal paying and Venerini training the teachers. ⁴ When Venerini had to go back to Viterbo she entrusted those schools and their teachers to "a young woman, St. Lucia Filippini, in whom she has seen particular gifts of mind, heart and spirit." ⁴

The New Catholic Encyclopedia gives the same sequence: Lucy joined Venerini in 1692 and took over completely in 1694. ³ Catholic.net is the bluntest. Lucy, it says, was not the true founder of the Maestre Pie, but perhaps the most zealous, the most influential and the holiest of those who first spread it. ⁵ Catholic News Service says she worked with Barbarigo and Venerini and "helped form" the institute. ⁹ The Religious Teachers Filippini call Lucy and the cardinal their founders. ¹²

The community was given its form slowly. The Filippini say the cardinal wrote a rule for Lucy and her companions twelve years after the schools began, and the New Catholic Encyclopedia dates the formal establishment of the community to October 15, 1704, when they received their rule and habit from Barbarigo and made their oblation. ¹³

Teaching did not stop at the classroom door. Lucy and her teachers gave classes and conferences for grown women, encouraging them to pray and to do good works, and were sent to the poor and the sick. ¹² She believed the girls carried the school home with them, and the Filippini quote her: "Having learned in school those things that were necessary, they repeat them to parents and relatives at home and thus become so many young teachers." ¹ Catholic.net and Catholic News Service both credit the institute with raising the religious and social condition of Italian women long before schooling was compulsory. ⁵⁹

Barbarigo died in 1706. ³ In 1707 Pope Clement XI called Lucy to Rome to open schools there, which he placed under his own protection. ¹³⁵ Catholic.net says she opened the first school of the Maestre Pie in Rome, in the Via delle Chiavi d'Oro, and could stay little more than six months; the children came in far greater numbers than there was room for, and before she left half the district knew her as "la Maestra Santa", the holy teacher. ⁵

Fifty-two schools were opened in her lifetime, according to the Filippini. ¹ Catholic.net says she was a gifted, persuasive speaker but that her strength did not match the work. ⁵ She fell seriously ill in 1726 and, despite treatment in Rome, never fully recovered. ⁵

She died at Montefiascone at the age of sixty on March 25, 1732, the feast of the Annunciation, and Catholic.net says it was a day she had foretold. ¹³⁵

She was beatified on June 13, 1926, and Pope Pius XI canonized her on June 22, 1930. ³⁵ The Filippini note that she was given the last available niche in Saint Peter's Basilica. ¹

The community became the Pontifical Institute of the Religious Teachers Filippini, which the New Catholic Encyclopedia places under the sponsorship of the Apostolic Almoner. ¹³ The New Catholic Encyclopedia records an organizational division within it from 1828 to 1896, and counted about two thousand sisters in some 180 houses in Italy, England, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland and the United States. ³ In the United States, the Filippini write, Sister Ninetta Ionata worked under Archbishop Walsh in New Jersey, and the sisters helped keep the faith among Italian immigrants. ²

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Lucy Filippini, so none is given here. ¹³⁵⁹ The Roman Martyrology remembers her for the Christian education of girls and women, especially the poor. ⁸

Saint Lucy Filippini's feast day is March 25, the day of her death. ¹⁹ Vatican News lists her that day as "Virgin, Foundress of the Maestre Pie Filippini". ⁶⁷ The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, enters her on March 25 near Montefiascone in Lazio, as founder of the Institute of the Maestre Pie for the Christian instruction of girls and women, especially poor ones. ⁸ The Filippini note that the day of her death was the feast of the Annunciation. ¹

Her work was handed to her. The first schools were Venerini's, opened at Barbarigo's invitation, and one source says plainly that she did not found them. ⁴⁵ She made them her life's work anyway, and the community that came of it carries her name. ¹³

What she taught was ordinary: reading, sewing, weaving, the catechism. ¹ She trusted that a girl who learned it would take it home, and the line the Filippini keep from her is about that, girls becoming "so many young teachers" in their own houses. ¹

She worked past the point her health allowed, and the last six years of her life were spent ill. ⁵ She died on the day the Church remembers Mary's yes to the angel. ¹