Virginia Centurione Bracelli: When God is the only goal, all difficulties are overcome

Ever since her youth, everything had stood in the way of the religious aspirations of Virginia Centurione, the heiress of a great Genoese aristocratic family. And yet, without rebelling against the accumulation of trials that hindered her life, she made a complete act of surrender to God and entrusted herself to him to remove the countless obstacles that prevented her from living out her vocation. One day, shortly before God called her back on 15 December 1651, she observed: "When God is the only goal, all disagreements are smoothed out, all difficulties overcome." 

Reasons to believe:

• Born into a wealthy and powerful family, Virginia Centurione could have lived a life of opulence and ease, with all the amenities enjoyed by women in her milieu. Yet when she was barely an adolescent, she longed for the simplicity of the cloister and, proving that God's call was genuine, she never let anything distract her from her religious vocation.

• She was fifteen when her father forced her to marry Gaspare Bracelli, a young scoundrel of the same social milieu who gave her two daughters but deceived and humiliated her. She put up with him with angelic patience and led him back to God before his premature death in 1607.

• Widowed at the age of twenty, she stood up to her father who wanted to find a new husband for her and, despite her beauty and youth, took a definitive vow of chastity, then retired to her mother-in-law's house, saying: "Lord, I no longer wish to serve anyone but You, for You alone cannot die."

• The patience and kindness she exercised during her difficult married life and the time she spent in prayer enabled her to acquire a special gift for settling disputes, which were frequent in the Italian society of her time. Everyone understood that this was a charism granted by Heaven: she enjoyed a reputation as an extraordinary peacemaker, much admired by the Genoese leaders, who did not hesitate to call on her services to prevent dissensions from escalating and degenerating.

• After three years of retirement and solitude, Virginia realised that God was calling her to found a charity dedicated to relieving all the distress that came her way, and first and foremost to protecting the women and young girls forced into prostitution. In doing so, she defied the objections of "good society", which was scandalised to see a lady from her background frequenting the quays of the port, the streets of ill-repute and the slums. The places she visited were indeed dangerous, but despite the risks she took, nothing untoward ever happened to her because the hand of God protected her.

• The same was true during the plague epidemic of 1629-1630, when, ignoring the risk of contagion, she visited insalubrious houses, nursed the sick and took in orphaned girls, whom she did not hesitate to bring to her house.

• Her fortune was depleted, but she continued not only to spend lavishly to help the poor, but also to expand her works, moving into a shanty to save the cost of rent, showing the extent of her love of neighbour and her contempt for personal or selfish interests. This also shows the constant intervention of providence, without which her efforts would have failed.

• The discovery in 1801 (150 years after her death) of her incorrupt and still supple body served as a reminder of her reputation for holiness and prompted the opening of her cause for beatification. Virginia Centurione was canonised in 2003, a proof that she exercised the Christian virtues to a heroic level, in particular an extraordinary faith, hope and charity.

• During her lifetime, she was already credited with several miracles of healing. The Church chose two of them, both recent and therefore documented from a medical point of view, for her beatification in 1985 and her canonisation in 2003. The first concerned a young nun in her congregation who recovered from a normally fatal form of meningitis, the second the sister of another of her nuns, a Brazilian mother who was instantly cured of terminal cancer.