October 20: Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin
A Hidden Light
What is striking about her is not the extraordinariness of her works, but her ability to transform the ordinary into an inspired offering. Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin—born Anna Francesca—was a simple woman, at times impulsive, yet endowed with deep determination and remarkable self-control. Often the target of jealousy and misunderstanding, she never allowed herself to be discouraged: her resolve, “I want to become a saint and bring many souls to Jesus,” became her life’s program.
Anna Francesca was born on October 6, 1888, in Brendola (Vicenza), into a peasant family. She grew up in humble surroundings yet rich in faith and hard work.
From her youth she felt drawn to a life wholly offered to God. At sixteen, moved by an intense vocation, she knocked on the doors of the Institute of the Sisters Teachers of Saint Dorothy, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts, in Vicenza. Despite the doubts of the parish priest, who considered her too simple for religious life, she was accepted. Upon entering the novitiate, she took the name Maria Bertilla.
Her religious path began quietly. After professing her vows on December 8, 1907, she was sent to serve at the hospital in Treviso. Her first assignments were in the kitchen, where she willingly took on the hardest tasks, approaching them with a spirit of offering and inner dedication.
Soon, however, her gifts of compassion and attentiveness to the suffering became evident, and she was assigned to direct care of the sick. During the difficult years of the First World War, when the bombings even reached the hospital, Bertilla remained at the side of the wounded—tireless and courageous—saving as many as she could and bringing hope through prayer. At the end of a spiritual retreat in 1914, she wrote her life program: “Jesus as my model, God as my goal, Mary as my support, myself as an offering.”
And she lived each day accordingly: setting herself aside to bring comfort to others, praising God through daily toil and offering every gesture as an act of love.
The strength that sustained her was summed up in a conviction she often repeated: “In Jesus I find my strength.”
Stricken with cancer, she never wavered in her total readiness to serve. She bore her suffering with unshakable trust, even when the illness returned after an initial operation. On October 20, 1922, at only thirty-four years of age, her life ended quietly, in the spirit of complete surrender that had always guided her. Her last words to the Mother Superior were: “Tell the sisters to work only for the Lord, that everything is nothing, everything is nothing… only Jesus… Jesus.”
Soon after her death, her reputation for holiness spread rapidly. In 1952 she was beatified by Pope Pius XII. The same Pontiff canonized her nine years later, in 1961. Her body rests in the chapel dedicated to her on Via San Domenico in Vicenza.