Saint Maria De Mattias

She was born on February 4, 1805, at Vallecorsa, which the Holy See calls the southernmost town of the Papal States, in the province of Frosinone. ² The family had money and learning, the Holy See says, "even if women were forbidden to study," and a deep Christian faith. ² Michele Colagiovanni's biography, as the Adorers publish it, says her mother, Ottavia De Angelis, seems to have been fiery and irritable, and suggests the daughter took after her. ⁸

Her father read the Scriptures to her when she was very young, and through those talks she came to love Jesus as the Lamb sacrificed for the salvation of the world. ² All this happened, the Holy See notes, while Vallecorsa and its district lived through a tragic period of banditry, from 1810 to 1825, so that in her mind there grew a comparison between the blood poured out in hatred and revenge around her and the blood of Christ poured out for love. ² Sister Anita Fearday quotes Merlini's memory of the child: "Maria often went around the house jumping, running and doing crazy things, but innocent things." ⁷

Because of her class she had no schooling and few contacts outside the house, and she learned to read and write on her own. ²⁶ The Holy See says she spent her girlhood absorbed in her own beauty. ²

At sixteen or seventeen, by the Holy See's account, she began to search for the meaning of her life. ² She told her father about the darkness inside her and asked Our Lady for light, and God let her experience, in a mystical way, the beauty of his love, shown fully in the crucified Christ who gives all his blood. ² The Adorers say the vision came at sixteen. ⁶

Gianpiero Pettiti, writing for santiebeati.it, tells it as a story: one day at seventeen the mirror she liked to look into gave her no pleasure, and in her frustration she noticed in it the reflection of a picture of the Madonna that had hung over her bed for years, and the encounter changed her life (our summary of the Italian). ⁴

In 1822, when she was seventeen, Gaspar del Bufalo came to preach a mission at Vallecorsa. ²⁴ The Holy See says she saw the townspeople change, and that this was when the dream was born in her to do what Father Gaspar was doing. ²

She was called to teach girls at Acuto, a small mountain town near Rome, by the administrator of the diocese of Anagni, Bishop Giuseppe Maria Lais. ²⁴ There, under the guidance of Giovanni Merlini, one of Saint Gaspar's companions, she founded the Congregation of the Sisters Adorers of the Blood of Christ on March 4, 1834, at the age of twenty-nine. ²⁶ Merlini was her spiritual director for some forty years and wrote her first life. ⁴

Fearday says the beginning was hard: she had to work with religious and civil authorities who were often against women doing what she proposed, she had little money, and the community had to move house several times in Acuto. ⁷ John Paul II said she placed the institute "under the emblem of the Divine Blood." ³

She did not keep to the schoolroom. She gathered mothers and boys to teach them the faith, and the men, whom custom did not let her address, came anyway, "even in hiding," and the shepherds asked to be taught after sundown. ² Pettiti adds that the bishop sent a Jesuit incognito to see what was going on, and that he reported the woman "speaks better than a priest" (our translation). ⁴

Fearday calls her "the woman who preached in church," speaking to hundreds at a time, girls, women, men, soldiers and priests among them, and up to three times a day. ⁷ She quotes Merlini: "She expressed the ideas that welled up from the depths of her heart and never seemed to have said all she wished to say, so that her conferences would go on for an hour or even an hour and a half without tiring her audience." ⁷

Her aim, in the words the Holy See gives her, was "to make known to everyone the tender love of the Heavenly Father," or "the Crucified Love Jesus." ² She was convinced, it says, that the reform of society begins in the heart of each person, who is changed on understanding how precious they are in God's eyes. ² Her longing was that not one drop of the Divine Blood should be lost. ²

Pettiti says she traveled from town to town by mule, and wrote nearly two thousand letters to ordinary people, priests and bishops, mayors and prefects. ⁴ John Paul II quoted one of her exhortations: "Let us encourage one another to suffer willingly out of love of Jesus who with such great love shed his blood for us. Let us work hard to win souls for heaven." ³

Young women joined her, and through them, the Holy See says, she opened about seventy communities in her lifetime, three of them in Germany and England, almost all in small, isolated towns of central Italy. ² The Adorers count nearly seventy schools over her last thirty-two years. ⁶ Fearday counts fifty-six schools, and more than two hundred women wearing the habit at her death. ⁷ The exception to the small towns was Rome, where Pius IX called her to the hospice of San Luigi, and the school at Civitavecchia. ²

She died in Rome on August 20, 1866. ²⁴ Pius IX chose her tomb at the Verano cemetery and had a bas-relief carved on it of Ezekiel's vision, with the words "Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord." ² Her congregation's own biography, on santiebeati.it, says her remains are now venerated in the church of the Most Precious Blood beside its generalate in Rome. ⁴

Her cause opened thirty years after her death. ² Pius XII beatified her on October 1, 1950, and John Paul II canonized her on May 18, 2003, with Józef Sebastian Pelczar, Urszula Ledóchowska and Virginia Centurione Bracelli. ²³ The Adorers came to the United States in 1870. ⁶

No source read for this page names her patron of any group or cause. ²⁴ Her work was teaching and preaching, especially to the poor of the countryside, and her sisters carry it on, but none of the sources makes it a patronage. ²⁶

Saint Maria De Mattias's feast is August 20, the day of her death. ² The Roman Martyrology lists her that day, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives August 20 as her memorial, and Vatican News lists her among the saints of August 20. ¹⁵⁹

Among her own sisters the date differs. Sister Anita Fearday, an Adorer, writing for the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, calls February 4 "her feast day and birthday." ⁷ Both dates are given here; August 20 is the date of the Church's calendar. ¹⁷

She grew up in a district where people were killing each other, and what she learned from her father to set against it was the blood of Christ, poured out for love. ² That is the devotion her congregation is named for. ³

She was not supposed to study, and taught herself; she was not supposed to speak to men, and they came to hear her anyway. ² The sources do not present this as defiance. The Holy See says she always worked in communion with the local and the universal Church. ²

Her phrase for the people she served was "the dear neighbor," and her purpose, she said, was "giving pleasure to Jesus," who had stolen her heart when she was young. ² John Paul II read her life as an invitation to follow the Lamb who gave himself for us. ³