Blessed Catherine and Judith Cittadini

“To belong to Christ, to bring others to Christ”

Catherine Cittadini was born in Bergamo on September 28, 1801, to Giovanni Battista and Margherita Lanzani, and was baptized on September 30 in the parish church of St. Alexander in Colonna. In 1808, orphaned by her mother and abandoned by her father, Catherine, together with her sister Judith born in 1803, was welcomed into the orphanage of the Conventino in Bergamo. Here, under the guidance of Prior Don Giuseppe Brena, she lived an intense Christian life, which contributed to forming in her a robust faith, deep trust in the Lord, active charity, tender devotion to Our Lady, a great sense of responsibility and diligence in fulfilling her duties. After obtaining her elementary teaching diploma, in 1823 she left the Conventino to move with her sister to live with their priest cousins Giovanni and Antonio Cittadini in Calolzio, a parish in the Diocese of Bergamo.

Here the sisters remained for about two years, finding in their priest cousins a secure spiritual guide and a pastorally very active environment. Catherine was hired as a provisional teacher and in 1824 as a permanent teacher in the municipal girls’ school of Somasca, a hamlet of the Municipality of Vercurago near Calolzio. With her sister Judith, she matured the desire to enter a religious Congregation.

They therefore asked for advice from Don Giuseppe Brena, their spiritual director at the Conventino in Bergamo, who indicated to them that God’s will consisted in remaining in Somasca: they themselves would be the foundational stones of a new religious family in that small town already guardian of the sanctity of St. Jerome Emiliani.

In 1826, together with her sister Judith, she moved permanently to Somasca in a rented house. In October of the same year, she bought a building which, renovated and expanded with further purchases, would become the seat of a boarding school and later of the religious institute of the Ursuline Sisters.

In Somasca, Catherine found valid guidance for her spiritual life in the Somascan Clerics Regular, founded by St. Jerome Emiliani, whom she felt as a “father” from her orphaned childhood and whose example of charity and poverty she admired and followed.

Her role as teacher integrated her into the life of the small town of Somasca, where Catherine actively participated in parish life: she was a teacher of Christian doctrine, enrolled in various confraternities, participated with her companions and students in sacred functions, opened her house to welcome young women to animate and recreate them according to the oratorian style.

Catherine carried out her task with such fervor and commitment that she always earned the highest praise from authorities and unanimous consensus from the population.

Her attention to the neediest and poorest led her to extend, not without great sacrifices of every kind, her charitable work to orphaned girls or those unable to attend the municipal school or coming from distant towns. Thus was born in 1832 the private “Cittadini” school and in 1836 the Boarding School, whose direction Catherine entrusted to her sister Judith.

Positive evaluations of the private school and the educational institution multiplied: indeed, the formation of the students, inspired by the values of Christian life, prepared the girls to make wise life choices, lived with Christian coherence, so that an exceptional contemporary witness could write: “The most convincing proof, which alone suffices to clarify the excellent instruction that those girls received from the pious teachers, is the constant flourishing of that boarding school until now, a consequence of the excellent success of their students, who not only enriched themselves in Somasca with every religious, moral and civil virtue and those arts befitting women, but also brought such benefits to their towns, where many either established new schools or revived those already declined, with such profit to morality that those parish priests still regard the Ursuline teachers of Somasca as the principal benefactresses of the people they direct.”

Catherine’s entire life was always accompanied by great trials. In 1840, Judith died suddenly at only 37 years old, with whom she had shared everything: family sufferings, formation, ideals, projects, activities. In 1841, with the death of Don Giuseppe Brena and cousin Don Antonio Cittadini, she lost other very valuable supports.

In 1842, Catherine herself was struck by a serious illness, from which she recovered miraculously through the intercession of Our Lady of Caravaggio and St. Jerome Emiliani.

In 1845, she had to leave teaching in the municipal school to dedicate herself entirely to the boarding school, the care of orphans, and the guidance of the companions who had joined her, determined to share not only her educational activity but also her will to consecrate herself entirely to the Lord in religious life.

In 1844, Catherine, to give stability to her work, at least civilly, stipulated with three companions an “Instrument of Society and Fate and also of reciprocal donation or Annuity,” which already presented many characteristics of a religious Institute. In 1850, she obtained from Pius IX the Decree of erection of the private Oratory where the Most Holy Eucharist could be preserved. In 1850-51, she addressed various petitions to the Bishop of Bergamo, Msgr. Carlo Gritti Morlacchi, to obtain approval of her “small religious family” and a rule, but the time was not yet ripe. In 1854, Catherine had a meeting with the new Bishop, Msgr. Pietro Luigi Speranza, who encouraged her to write the rules herself and promised his help. Catherine drafted them on the model of the constitutions of the Ursulines of Milan, but when she presented them to the Bishop, they were not accepted.

Without giving up, she prepared a new text, which she forwarded to the Bishop on September 17, 1855, accompanied by a request in which she asked for approval of the Institute with the title of Hieronymite Ursulines. Msgr. Speranza approved the rules ad experimentum, promising definitive approval of the new Institute. Catherine awaited with such trust the longed-for day, but the labors, worries, and sufferings had seriously affected her health, and a general organic deterioration gradually reduced her to the point of death.

Always lucid, trusting and in continuous prayer, she exhorted her companions to accept the Lord’s will with serenity, because everything would continue. She died on May 5, 1857, after a day of agony, serenely and saintly, surrounded by a reputation of sanctity and greatly mourned by her daughters, the students, and the population, leaving to all her luminous example of profound spiritual maturity.