Vercéllis Ordinátio sancti Eusébii, Epíscopi et Mártyris.

At Vercelli, the ordination of St. Eusebius, bishop and martyr.

1771 BD MARY MARGARET D’YoUvILLE (née Dufrost de Lajemmerais). Born at Varennes near Montreal, 1701; left a widow in 1722, she devoted herself to hospital work and in 1738 founded the Grey Nuns of Canada. She died on 23 December 1771 and was beatified in 1959.

During the next ten years Paula continued to live at home, but engaging herself more and more in social good works, in which she had the worthy example of her father before her eyes. Among his properties was a textile mill at Acquafredda where a number of girls worked, and one of Paula’s first undertakings was to look after the spiritual welfare of these young women; this solicitude she extended to those of Capriano, where the Rosas had a country house.

   Here, with co­operation of the parish priest, she established a women’s guild and arranged retreats and special missions in the parish, with such good results that the rector hardly knew his own flock.

Reference has already been made, in speaking of Bd Ludovic Pavoni and Bd Teresa Verzeri, to the cholera epidemics that devastated northern Italy at this time, and the outbreak at Brescia in 1836 gave Paula di Rosa another opportunity. She asked her father’s permission to work among the stricken in the hospital, and after some doubt and with considerable trepidation he agreed. The hospital welcomed Paula, who was accompanied by a widow, Gabriela Echenos-Bornati, who had already had some experience of nursing the sick, and they set an example of selfless hard work and gentle care that made a very deep impression on everybody. *{* Manzoni’s description in The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) of the isolation-hospital in Milan gives an idea of the conditions in which they worked.}
In consequence Paula was asked to undertake the supervision of an institution, which was a sort of workhouse for penniless and abandoned girls—a delicate and difficult post for a young woman of only twenty-four. She filled it successfully for two years, but then resigned in consequence of a difference with the trustees, who did not want the girls to lodge in the house at night. Paula herself then established a small lodging-house with room for a dozen girls to sleep, and at the same time gave her attention to a work that had been projected by her brother Philip and Mgr Pinzoni, namely, a school for deaf-and-dumb girls, on the lines of what Ludovic Pavoni was doing for boys. This school was still in its infancy when Paula handed it over to the Canossian sisters, who wished to do the same work in Brescia on a bigger scale.
All this was a really extraordinary ten-year record for a woman still under thirty and of delicate health and physique. But there was a certain virile quality in Paula di Rosa, and she had a physical energy and courage hardly to be expected—she once rescued somebody from a bolting horse and carriage in very dangerous circumstances. And her mind was to match, quick, acute and steady, so that, while living with heroic virtue, she was not content that intellectually and psycho­logically her religion should remain at the level of the “penny catechism”.
She acquired an unusual knowledge of theology, and brought to her reading the same liveliness of spirit and delicacy of perception that informed her dealings with practical affairs. Her mental ability was particularly noted when she became involved in the complexities inseparable from the establishment of a religious congregation, and she was further helped by a remarkably good memory for people and things, large and small. This congregation began to take shape in 1840, first in the form of a religious society of which the Archpriest Pinzoni appointed Paula superioress. With her was associated Mrs Bornati (who indeed may be called co-foundress), and the object of the society was to look after the sick in hospitals, not simply as nurses but as giving the whole of their time and interest unreservedly to the sick and suffering. They took the name of Handmaids of Charity, and the first four members took up their residence in an inconvenient and dilapidated house near the hospital. These were soon joined by fifteen Tirolese, who had heard about the undertaking from a visiting missioner, and before long the community numbered thirty-two. Their work aroused admiration that was publicly expressed in the press by a local doctor, who underlined the spiritual as well as the physical activities of the handmaids; but at the same time there was serious unfavourable criticism. Some people resented their presence as intruders, and tried to discredit them. This did not prevent an invitation, within three months of their foundation, to undertake similar work at Cremona, and this invitation was accepted. Of the difficulties at Brescia, “I hope that is not our last cross”, wrote Paula to the Cremona house, “because to tell the truth I should have been sorry had we not been persecuted”.
Before long Clement di Rosa, and their provisional rule of gave a new and more commodious house in Brescia to the handmaids life was approved by the bishop in 1843. But there was a counter-balance to these causes for rejoicing a few months later, when Gabriela Bornati died. Paula was thus deprived of her chief lieutenant, but she still had Mgr Pinzoni to advise and guide her, and the society continued to grow and to undertake the direction of new hospitals. But in the summer of 1848 death took the archpriest too, and that at a time when political upheaval was convulsing Europe and war had come to northern Italy.