The reading
How it began
Lucy dies on 25 March 1732, the Annunciation, which is also her feast. The body is kept at Montefiascone. The Filippini sisters took her method of teaching to America. The relic stayed on the lake of Bolsena, not far from the Eucharistic miracle of 1263.
The day itself
Lucy Filippini died at Montefiascone on 25 March 1732. With Cardinal Marcantonio Barbarigo she had founded the Maestre Pie, teachers of poor girls in the small towns of Lazio, a work parallel to Angela Merici’s and later to Paula Frassinetti’s: women in schools, not nuns in choir. She was buried in the cathedral of Montefiascone. At a recognition the body was found preserved and is shown there in a glass shrine under the altar dedicated to her. Pius XI canonized her on 22 June 1930. The cathedral is the right place to understand the scale of her life. Montefiascone is not Rome. The teachers she trained were for towns like it. The body stayed in the town where she died, which matches the work better than a translation to a capital would have.
Reading
How to read St. Lucy Filippini
Schools as a miracle of the ordinary. The body is the founder’s signature still on the building.
Church status
How this sign has been received
Church-approved
Canonized 1930. Relics in Montefiascone cathedral.
Sources
- Religious Teachers Filippini
- Cathedral of Montefiascone
For the classroom
St. Lucy Filippini (Died 1732; body at Montefiascone, Montefiascone Cathedral). Grade in this encyclopedia: Church-approved. Foundress, with Cardinal Barbarigo, of the Religious Teachers Filippini. The body, preserved, is in the cathedral of Montefiascone — a woman of schools for the poor of the Papal States.
