Saint Virginia Centurione Bracelli

She was born in Genoa on April 2, 1587, to Giorgio Centurione and Lelia Spinola, both of old noble families; her father was doge of the Republic in 1621 and 1622, though the Holy See's English biography calls him duke. ¹² She was baptized two days later and was taught her faith and her letters by her mother and a tutor at home. ¹²

From childhood, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints says, she was drawn to the cloister. ² Her father had other plans, and on December 10, 1602, she was married to Gaspare Grimaldi Bracelli, young, rich and the heir of an illustrious house, and in the Holy See's words "wholly taken up with gambling and dissolute life." ¹² They had two daughters, Lelia and Isabella. ¹²

The marriage was short. Gaspare did not change his ways, and they brought him close to death; Virginia, with patience, prayer and kindness, tried to persuade him to live more soberly. ¹² She went to Alessandria to nurse him, and he died there a Christian death on June 13, 1607. ¹²

At twenty she took a vow of perpetual chastity and refused the second marriages her father proposed. ¹² She lived withdrawn in her mother-in-law's house, raising her daughters, managing their property, and giving herself to prayer and charity. ¹² In 1610, the Dicastery says, she felt more clearly her particular calling, "to serve God in his poor", in words translated here from the Italian. ² Still closely watched by her father and never neglecting her family, she began to give away half the income of her dowry. ¹² Once her daughters were settled in marriage, she gave herself full time to abandoned children, the old, the sick and the marginalized. ¹²

War between the Republic and the Duke of Savoy, backed by France, brought unemployment and hunger to Genoa, and in the winter of 1624-1625 Virginia took about fifteen abandoned girls into her house, and then as many of the poor, especially women, as she could. ¹² When her mother-in-law died in August 1625 she went further. She no longer waited for girls to come to her but went through the city herself, especially its worst neighborhoods, looking for those most in need and most at risk. ¹²

To meet the growing poverty she founded the Hundred Ladies of Mercy, Protectors of the Poor of Jesus Christ, working alongside the city's existing Eight Ladies of Mercy, with the particular task of visiting the poor in their homes to see what they needed, especially those ashamed to ask. ¹² The Martyrology adds that she also supported the rural churches. ⁵

In the plague and famine of 1629-1630 the numbers outgrew her house, and she rented the empty convent of Monte Calvario, moving there with the women in her care on April 14, 1631, by the Italian text, or April 13, by the English. ¹² She placed them under the protection of Our Lady of Refuge. ¹² Within three years the work had three houses and some three hundred women, and the Senate of the Republic recognized it on December 13, 1635. ¹² She called them her daughters, shared her food and clothes with them, taught them the catechism and trained them in a trade so that they could earn their own living. ¹²

Monte Calvario proved too expensive to buy, so she bought two adjoining villas on the hill of Carignano, which, with a new wing and a church of Our Lady of Refuge, became the motherhouse. ¹² The Rule, written between 1644 and 1650, made all the houses one work under lay Protectors appointed by the Senate, and asked all the daughters, with the habit or without it and bound by no vows, to live in obedience and poverty like the most observant nuns, and to be ready to serve in the public hospitals. ¹² From this work came two congregations, the Sisters of Our Lady of Refuge on Mount Calvary and the Daughters of Our Lady on Mount Calvary. ¹²³

Once the Protectors were appointed, on July 3, 1641, she stopped interfering in the running of the house and deferred to them even over which girls to admit. ¹² She lived as the least of the daughters, the Dicastery says, doing the housework and going out morning and evening to beg for the community. ² As the work grew, many of the women who had helped her drifted away, especially those of the middle class and the nobility, afraid for their reputations. ¹² Abandoned by her helpers, set aside by the Protectors and in failing health, she was, in the Italian, "occupying the last place among the sisters in the house of Carignano", translated here; the Holy See's English has instead that she became responsible for the sisters there. ¹²

She did not withdraw from the city. On March 25, 1637, she obtained the Republic's choice of the Virgin as its protector. ¹² She persuaded the archbishop to begin the Forty Hours devotion, which started in Genoa late in 1642, and the preaching of parish missions in 1643. ¹² She tried to end the bloody feuds between noble families, and in 1647 reconciled the archbishop's curia and the government of the Republic, at odds over questions of precedence. ¹² She died on December 15, 1651, at sixty-four. ¹² John Paul II beatified her in Genoa on September 22, 1985, and canonized her in Rome on May 18, 2003. ¹²³

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Saint Virginia, so none is given here. ¹²³ The Martyrology remembers her as a widow who came to the help of the poor in many ways, and John Paul II told her sisters that the inheritance she left them was charity understood "not as simple material relief, but as a commitment of authentic solidarity", translated here from the Italian. ⁴⁵

Saint Virginia's feast is kept on December 15, the day she died. ² The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives it as her liturgical memorial, and the Roman Martyrology enters her on that day as a widow. ²⁵

John Paul II quoted a sentence of hers at her canonization: when God is one's only goal, "all disagreements are smoothed out, all difficulties overcome". ³ It was not the sentence of someone with an easy life: she had behind her an unhappy marriage, an early widowhood and a father who watched what she gave away. ¹²

She wanted the cloister and was given a husband instead. ¹² The life she made afterward was not a convent, and the women she gathered took no vows. ¹ It was lived in the middle of Genoa, in its worst streets and in the homes of people too ashamed to ask for help. ¹²

The work she founded was taken out of her hands, and she let it go. ¹² She ended in the last place in her own house, begging for the community she had started. ² Nothing in the sources says she complained of it.

John Paul II said she loved "with deeds and in truth", and that her effectiveness came from listening to the word of the Lord. ³ Her sisters, he said the next day, inherited a charity that looked at the face of God in the person in need. ⁴