A
friend of Pope Leo XIII and the teacher of St. Gemma Galgani, BLESSED ELENA
GUERRA is known for her spiritual
writings and her passionate devotion to the Holy Spirit. When Pope
St. John XXIII beatified her in 1959, he called her the “modern day apostle of
the Holy Spirit”.
She was born into a noble
family in Lucca, Italy in 1835, one of six children. She was well-educated and
formed in her faith.In her childhood she was known to be talented but
timid in nature.
For
much of her 20s, Elena was bedridden for eight years with a serious illness, a
time in which she spent meditating on Scripture and the writings of the Church
Fathers.
During
a pilgrimage to Rome with her father after her recovery, she felt called to
consecrate herself to God.
She
attended the third public session of Vatican I in April 1870 and in June met
Pope Pius IX. She was so moved by seeing
the Holy Father, that upon returning to Lucca, she vowed to offer her life for
the pope.
Elena
wrote more than a dozen letters to Pope Leo XIII between 1895 and 1903 in which
she urged him to exhort all Catholics to call upon the Holy Spirit in prayer.
He
heeded her request and published three documents on the Holy Spirit, including
a letter asking the entire Church to pray a novena to the Holy Spirit leading
up to Pentecost in 1895, and his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Divinum Illud
Munus, in 1897.
“Pentecost
is not over. In fact, it is continually going on in every time and in every
place, because the Holy Spirit desired to give Himself to all men and all who
want Him can always receive Him, so we do not have to envy the apostles and the
first believers; we only have to dispose ourselves like them to receive Him
well, and He will come to us as He did to them”, Elena wrote.
Against
the wishes of her family, in her mid-30s Guerra formed a religious community
dedicated to education, which eventually became the Oblates of the Holy Spirit.
One of her students, St. Gemma
Galgani, wrote in her autobiography about the strong spiritual
impact of her education by the Oblate sisters. Bl. Elena personally taught the
future saint French and Church history and exempted her from the monthly school
fee when her father fell into bankruptcy.
At
one point she corresponded withSt. Arnold Janssen SVD (d.1909), a
German-Dutch Catholic priest and missionary. He founded
the Society of the Divine Word, a Catholic
missionary religious congregation, also known
as the Divine Word Missionaries, as well as two congregations for women. He
was canonized on 5 October 2003, by Pope John
Paul II.
True
for many spiritual founders, Bl. Elena faced difficulties in the last years of
her life when some of her sisters accused her of bad administration, leading
her to resign from her duties as superior.
She died on Holy Saturday on April 11, 1914. Her tomb is located in
Lucca in the Church of Sant’Agostino. The Oblate sisters whom Bl. Elena founded
are found today in Italy, Cameroon, Canada, Philippines, and Rwanda.
St. John Bosco referred to Elena as a
"golden pen" in reference to her spiritual writings. Her feast is April 11.
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