Saint Vincenza Gerosa

Caterina Gerosa was born at Lovere, on Lake Iseo near Bergamo, on October 29, 1784, the eldest of four sisters, into a well-to-do family. ²⁴⁷ Lovere was then under the Republic of Venice, and the family business was what made the Gerosas comfortable. ⁴ The sources differ on her schooling. The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints says her delicate health kept her from school; Mariella Lentini, on santiebeati.it, says she went into the family business after elementary school; Domenico Agasso says she began studying with the Benedictine nuns of Gandino and had to stop because of her health. ²⁴

What they agree on is the counter. She was drawn early into the family business, and her congregation says she showed "a capacity for hard work and foresight" in it. ²⁵ The Dicastery, from santiebeati.it, describes a simple, ordinary spirituality built on daily Mass. ²

The years after Napoleon's invasion of Italy marked her deeply, the Dicastery says, through money troubles and through deaths: her father, her sister Francesca, and in 1814 her mother. ² Lentini says that when she was orphaned she used her inheritance to raise her workers' pay and to help the needy more, inviting poor mothers who could not feed their children to her house and cooking for them; she dressed in patched clothes and ate little, often polenta and nuts, to have more to give, and people called her aunt. ⁴ She refused an offer of marriage. ⁴

She threw herself into the parish, the Dicastery says, and organized an oratory for girls, with meetings, retreats and practical schools of housework. ² In 1824 she met Bartolomea Capitanio, a teacher of seventeen from the same town. ²⁴ The congregation says the two had already worked side by side in the girls' oratory and its associations, and in the hospital that had been opened, in its English, "at the expense of the Gerosas, who were successful traders in leather". ⁵ Agasso says the two friends set up the hospital together with the Gerosa inheritance ⁴; Giacomo Drago, writing on Bartolomea, says Caterina and her sister Rosa founded it. ⁹

Caterina preferred quiet charity. "She loved charity's modest, discreet ways, done promptly and according to need," the congregation says, "until her friend upset her humble daily routine with the proposal to join her in founding an Institute." ⁵ She was, it says, "at first dismayed and against the idea," and then gave herself to it wholeheartedly as God's will. ⁵ The congregation's reading for the founders' feast quotes a resolution of hers from her first Life, published in 1862: that she would feel the afflictions of the poor with her whole heart, and that the most abandoned would be the special object of her care (our translation from the Italian). ⁷

On the morning of November 21, 1832, the two women began the institute at Lovere, in an old house the townspeople called the "Conventino," the little convent. ⁵⁶⁷ The Dicastery says it took as its rule that of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Jeanne-Antide Thouret. ²

Bartolomea died on July 26, 1833, eight months after the founding, leaving the work to her. ⁵⁷ Pius XII, at the canonization, described what followed: Caterina wept for her companion and then went to the tabernacle and laid her uncertain, fearful and anxious mind before Christ, asking for light, counsel and strength (our summary of the Latin). ³ Agasso writes that she was alone, little educated, felt herself almost old, and wanted to leave it all. ⁴

The Dicastery says she was tempted to go back to her life at home, and that her spiritual father, Don Angelo Bosio, persuaded her to go on. ² Pius XII says that once she had heard from her director that she was meant for the work, she took it up readily, and whenever she felt unequal to it went back to pray, spending long hours at the altar of the Virgin. ³ Her congregation remembers a saying of hers that it gives in English as "Those who know the Crucified One, know everything." ⁵

Pius XII also recorded something of her humility: she used to call Bartolomea, her first companion, "mother" (our translation from the Latin). ³ She was twenty-two years older. ⁵⁶

Agasso says the small community followed the rule of Jeanne-Antide Thouret's sisters for seven years, until papal recognition came in 1840 and the Sisters of Maria Bambina were canonically established with the rules Bartolomea had written and with Caterina at their head, taking the name Sister Vincenza at her profession. ⁴ Drago's biography of Bartolomea dates the first clothing of sisters to November 21, 1835, when Vincenza was elected superior, and the papal brief to June 29, 1840. ⁹ The Dicastery says the institute, approved by Gregory XVI in 1840, spread quickly through Lombardy and into the Trentino and the Veneto. ²

In 1842 the sisters were called to Milan. ⁴ Agasso says the archbishop, Cardinal Gaysruck, wanted to make them an institute of his own diocese, and Vincenza refused: they had been born at Lovere, and Lovere would be their home, under their own rules. ⁴ The congregation credits her with bringing the institute, "ever faithful to the intuition of the foundress," to its inner consolidation and a remarkable expansion. ⁵

She died in June 1847: on June 20, according to santiebeati.it and the Dicastery, and on June 29, according to the congregation. ²⁴⁵⁷ At her death there were 171 sisters by Agasso's count, and 156 members in 25 communities by the congregation's. ²⁴⁵ She is buried in the sisters' sanctuary at Lovere. ⁴

Pius XI beatified her on May 7, 1933, seven years after Bartolomea. ²⁹ Pius XII canonized them together in Saint Peter's on May 18, 1950, during the Holy Year. ²³ Don Bosio, the congregation says, had begun the cause of Bartolomea and prepared good ground for Vincenza's. ⁵ In the homily, Pius XII prayed that the two women would look down together on the congregation they had founded. ³

The congregation the two of them began sent its first sisters to Bengal in 1860, to Buenos Aires in 1909 and to Africa from 1959. ⁸ The congregation quotes the founders' own verdict on it: "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 anyone or anything. ²⁴ Her life was given to the poor of Lovere and to the sick, the orphans and the girls her sisters served, but none of the sources turns that into a patronage. ²⁵

Saint Vincenza Gerosa's feast is June 28. The Roman Martyrology lists her that day, and the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives June 28 as her memorial. ¹² Pius XII's decree of canonization fixed her memorial on June 28, on what it calls the dies natalis of the two founders, their birth into heaven. ³ The sources disagree on the day she died, June 20 or June 29, and neither is the feast. ²⁵

Her congregation celebrates her together with Bartolomea Capitanio on May 18, the anniversary of their canonization, as a solemnity, and santiebeati.it says the dioceses of Brescia, Bergamo and Milan keep that date too. ⁴⁷

She was nearly fifty when the institute began, and she had not wanted it. ⁵⁷ Her charity until then had been the kind she could do herself: a meal for a hungry mother, higher wages, a visit to a house with nothing in it. ⁴ The sources do not hide that she was frightened, or that she wanted to go home when her friend died. ²⁴

What they record is that she went to pray, and then went on. ³ Pius XII put it in a phrase of Paul's that he applied to her: God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. ³

She called the younger woman "mother," and spent fourteen years building what that woman had planned. ³⁵ The saying the congregation keeps of hers is about the cross: "Those who know the Crucified One, know everything." ⁵