St. Angela Merici

Who they were

Angela was an orphaned Lombard farm girl, a Franciscan tertiary who never entered a cloister and never married, and who saw with complete clarity the gap her century pretended not to notice: nobody taught poor girls anything.

Her answer, founded at Brescia in 1535 under the patronage of St. Ursula, was without precedent. The Ursulines were a company of women vowed to God but living at home, in ordinary clothes, teaching girls in their own neighbourhoods: religious life without walls, invented three centuries before the Church was ready for it. After her death church authorities gradually cloistered the company, and her original vision waited for the modern era to be vindicated. Her rule's counsel to her daughters is startlingly warm and modern: persuade rather than force, adapt to the times, and be bound to one another by the bond of charity. The Ursulines became the great educators of girls on four continents, and the first nuns in the New World and in North America were hers.

Why people turn to St. Angela Merici

Parents of daughters, girls' schools and their teachers, and single laywomen. Angela is the patron of the consecrated in place life the Church took centuries to name.

How to ask their intercession

For a daughter's education by name, meaning the whole arc of it rather than the grades, and for the women teaching her.