Jesus said that it is as hard for a rich
person to get to heaven as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and yet
we have seen quite a few people of noble or high birth become saints.
One
recently declared Blessed is ARMIDA BARELLI, the founder of the first
women’s youth circles of Catholic Action as well as the Secular
Institute of the Missionaries of the Kingship of Christ in
Assisi and co-founder in 1921, together with Father Agostino Gemelli, of the
Catholic University of the Sacred Heart.
She
was born in Milan in 1882, into
the upper class to Napoleon Barelli and Savina Candiani. She had two brothers
and three sisters.
She studied in a Swiss boarding school under
the Franciscan Sisters
of the Holy Cross from 1895 to 1900. It was during her time
with the Franciscans that she discovered her religious vocation and the
Franciscan charism as well as a desire to deepen her relationship with God and to devote herself to His work. She
received proposals to wed but despite this she decided to devote herself to
others and in particular the needs of the poor and the orphaned.
In
1910 she met the Franciscan Agostino Gemelli, with whom she organized the
consecration of Italian soldiers to the Sacred Heart in the Great War. In 1917
Cardinal Andrea Ferrari, Archbishop of Milan, invited her to take care of the
women’s movement, and she founded the first circles of the future Women’s Youth
of Catholic Action, which in September 1918, on behalf of Pope Benedict XV,
were extended into all Italy.
In 1949 she began to suffer the effects of a
progressive and an incurable disease and on 8 January 1952 suffered paralysis
in her right hand. On 15 August 1952 she was visited by Gemelli, only to die
mere hours later.
She
is buried in the crypt of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, in
Milan.
Cardinal
Tomas Spidlik attributed to her “a wonderful contemplative vision of
everything that surrounds her, and a great human sensitivity.” Blessed Armida is
a key figure in the twentieth century church and the seeds sown then, with the
spiritual and also vocational movement started by her work are still visible
today.
Without the experience of the female youth, everything that the Second
Vatican Council subsequently acknowledged, with respect to the role of the
laity, women and movements in the Church, would have been different. Her
apostolic and missionary zeal led her to give birth to an initiative of sisters
still active in China, but her commitment was above all aimed at giving
awareness to the right and duty of women to participate in the life of civil
society and that of the Church.
The goal was to ensure that women could bring
their personal experience into reflection on the dimension of the sacred. As
for the more demanding pastoral challenges, she used to repeat that “Catholics
have no right to be mediocre as witnesses to the royal priesthood of Christ.”
She was beatified April 30, 2022 and her feast is November 19.
