Page:A Dictionary of Saintly Women Volume 1.djvu/74

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60 YEN. ANGELA there, to mollify Heaven in favour of her afflicted country, she macerated her innocent body until her fastings and austerities brought her so near the gates of death that her recovery was deemed miraculous. In this same year, 1529, the Emperor, the King of France, and the Pope came to terms, and peace was restored. Angela then returned to Brescia, and while at- tending Mass, she fell into an ecstasy, during which she was seen by several persons to be raised from the ground and to float in the air for a considerable time. Many revelations were made to her, and she told things she could not possibly havo known by means less than supernatural. Notwithstanding all these favours of God, and her great progress in spiritual life, she still delayed to found the order. One night, in a vision, Chnst up- braided her with neglect of her voca- tion. After this she felt she could no longer defer the execution of her plan. She stirred up her companions, and on Nov. 15, 1535, they went to the prisons, the hospitals, and the poorest and lowest places, and each collected into her own house all the young girls she could find, and began to instruct them. At first it was merely an asso- ciation; the associates did their work each under her parents' roof. They could thus go, in their ordinary clothes, into houses that would have been closed against them had they worn the dis- tinctive dress of a religious order, because at this time the doctrines of Luther were beginning to leaven society. Angela would not be called founder, nor allow the new order to be named after her; but as St. Ursula is the patron of all who devote themselves to the care and education of young women, she called her companions Ursulines. She gave them a rule, but did not compel them to live together or to bring any dowry to the association. They only took simple vows. With the approbation of the bishop of Brescia, she was superior of her own community for about five years, but did not live to see the triumph of her order. She died on Jan. 27, 1540, and was buried in the church of St Afra, over which a miraculous light was seen by all the city for several nights. She was venerated as a saint by the inhabitants of Brescia long before her death, and multitudes resorted to her tomb to obtain favours of God through her intercession. Pope Paul III., soon after her death, gave the now order his sanction, and St. Charles Borromeo, the young archbishop of Milan, seeing its immense usefalness in Brescia, established a branch in Milan. In 1572 Gregory XIII. raised it to the rank of a religious order, under the rule of St. Augustine, and bound its members to the cloister. The Institute of the Ursulines consists of several congregations, differing in minor matters, but all having for their object the education of girls. There were more than 300 houses of this order in France before the Eevolution, one of the most fieunous being that in the Roe St. Jacques, Paris, where Madame de Maintenon was a boarder. St. Charles Borromeo busied himself about her canonization, but it was not accomplished in his lifetime. She was inscribed among the saints by Clement XIIL in 1768; beatified by Pius VL, and solemnly canonized, in 1807, by Pius YII. She is claimed as a member* both by the Augustinian Order and the Third Order of St. Francis. Her name is in the It.M,, Jan. 27, the day of her death, and also May 31. The Bene- dictines transfer her festival to June 2, and the Eomano-Seraphic Order to Feb. 21. (Appendix B,M.) Her Life, pub- lished by Duffy, in the Young CJiristian*^ Library, Guerin, Les Fetits Bollan- diste^y xii. Ven. Angela (8) Mary Astorch, Sept. 29. 1092-1705. Born at Barce- lona. Of a rich family, who opposed her vocation. She became a Capuchin nun in Barcelona, was appointed mistress of the novices in a new convent of her order at Saragossa, and afterwards supe- rior of another which she built at Murcia. She resigned that office, and devoted herself to her own salvation. Pius IX., in 1851, published a decree, pronouncing her possessed of heroio virtue. Leon, Aureole.