St Angela Merici

Even though the priest didn't use the propers for Mass, today is the feast of St. Angela Merici, founder of the Ursulines. I have an Ursuline pedigree almost as good as my Jesuit one: My mom went to Ursuline College in New Orleans, and two of my sisters and I attended the Ursuline Academy for three years. (New Orleans itself, of course, has an Ursuline pedigree, since the sisters arrived in the city during its rough and tumble first decades to provide a residence for young French women who came to the city to find husbands among the workers and entrepreneurs!) (Imagine those men coming, hat in hand, to court the young ladies under the vigilant eyes of the Ursuline sisters!) Anyway, my best friend also went to Ursuline, not for three years, but for twelve, so I was always going to school events with her. Then, when I was living in Italy, I had the chance to spend ten days in Brescia, where St. Angela lived and where the Ursulines were founded. (I also took a little day-trip on the Lago di Garda to Descenzano, where the saint was born--this at the special request of my friend, Sr. Sheila Anne, OSU.) What amazes me about St. Angela--and I haven't even read any full-length biographies of her, although Sr. Sheila may read this and act to rectify the situation--is that she was a woman of the late 15th, early 16th centuries who founded a religious community for the education of women. What a bold and forward thinking person she must have been! And while Brescia was a pretty important town (it had been an important Stone-Age community, a key city for the Roman government and the seat of government for Charlemagne's father-in-law), it couldn't have been all that central in terms of politics and education in the 15th century. (Maybe I'm wrong about this, of course, but it is not far from Verona, which seems to have much more cultural influence.) Anyway, a woman worth admiring, a Renaissance woman who was not confined by the limits her age imposed on women, but who had God's eye and a mind for the future.