The reading
How it began
Paula dies in Rome in 1882. In 1906 the sisters open the coffin and find her preserved. The congregation she founded for the education of poor girls still keeps the shrine. She is canonized in 1984.
The day itself
Paula Frassinetti was born in Genoa on 3 March 1809 and died in Rome on 11 June 1882. With her brother Giuseppe, a parish priest at Quinto al Mare, she gathered women to teach poor children by day and to keep themselves by work at night. That company became the Sisters of St. Dorothy. In 1906, during the cause, the body was found preserved. It is kept in the chapel of the general house on the Gianicolo in Rome, vested as a sister. Pius XI beatified her on 8 June 1930. John Paul II canonized her on 11 March 1984. The schools — Italy, then Portugal, Brazil, and further — are the work that can be visited without a pilgrimage to the glass. The body is what the motherhouse shows the sisters when they come home.
Reading
How to read St. Paula Frassinetti
Another teaching foundress, another intact body. The pattern is itself a kind of evidence: the nineteenth century’s women who built schools were often given this strange afterlife of remaining.
Church status
How this sign has been received
Church-approved
Canonized 1984 by John Paul II. Relics at St. Onofrio, Rome.
Sources
- Sisters of St. Dorothy, Rome
- John Paul II, canonization 1984
For the classroom
St. Paula Frassinetti (Died 1882; found intact 1906, St. Onofrio, Rome). Grade in this encyclopedia: Church-approved. Foundress of the Sisters of St. Dorothy. Exhumed in 1906, the body was intact, the habit fresh. She lies in the chapel of St. Onofrio on the Janiculum.
