Foundress

  Brigida Morello was born on 17th June 1610 at San Michele of Pagana, near Rapallo, Genova province; her parents were Nicolò and Lavinia Borzese.From her early childhood she was endowed with special graces and grew with a constant vocation to holiness. Obedience to her parents, in 1633 she married Matteo Zancani of Salsomaggiore, but Cremonese by birth. After 3 years he got sick and died in 1637.

Brigida, left a widow and childless, consecrated herself to God with a vow of perpetual chastity, gave herself completely to prayer and put herself at the service of the parish as a cathechism teacher. She practised all the Christian virtues in a heroic manner, but her sensitivity towards the poor and the suffering made her very generous in the practice of charity. In 1640 she went to Piacenza, as a guest of her brother. Through prayer, penance and with a total abandonment to God’s will, she perceived more clearly the path she had to follow: that of following Jesus more closely in a monastery in order to “become a nun and a saint quickly”. She would have liked to join the monastery of the Capuchin Sisters, but she was not accepted because she was a widow. During the years 1642 –1648 she wrote a spiritual diary, in obedience to her confessor.

On 17th February 1649, Ash Wednesday, after having overcome uncommon difficulties, in strict poverty and with great faith in God, she founded the Institute of the Ursulines for the formation and Christian education of the young, to whom she was dedicated with extraordinary fervour and passion.

 

Brigida’s life and of the first Ursulines was not easy, specially at the beginning; only a solid faith and trustful abandonment to God’s goodness, could make Brigida say: “I trust in God; I will never doubt His divine mercy, which never forsakes those who trust in Him.”

 Her spiritual experience was fruitful; the open Heart of Jesus Crucified was the repose of her soul, of all her being and she would have liked to draw all creatures into the loving fire of Christ’s Love.

After an intense life of prayer, of contemplation and of sacrifice, of commitment for the growth of the new Congregation and of her educational service, Mother Brigida of Jesus died a holy death on 3rd September 1679.

Brigida Morello has left to her daughters, as inheritance, a great love for the Church, a missionary eagerness, zeal to enrich all people with the love and the hope that come from Christ Jesus.

                                         She was beatified on 15th March 1998 by Pope John Paul II.