Nov. 13 - St. Agostina Pietrantoni

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Tis_Bearself

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Today is the feast in US of the well-known St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, who is generally known as the first US saint to be canonized. (St. Isaac Jogues and two of his fellow North American Martyrs who died on what is now US soil were canonized earlier, but they died in the 1600s before the US was founded. ) It is also the feast of St. Didacus, St. Stanislaus Kostka, and a new saint I just learned about, St. Agostina Pietrantoni, a Sister of Charity in Rome who was a nurse and was murdered by one of her patients on Nov. 13, 1894.

Here’s a sensational 1894 Italian newspaper illustration of her murder:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

You can read more about St. Agostina’s life here:


I found it interesting that the hospital wasn’t allowed to have crucifixes or anything religious in the rooms, and the nurses couldn’t even mention God to their patients. Not so different from today even though it was 120+ years ago.

The article doesn’t mention this, but other sources say that her death was covered in the newspapers, and the last photo in the PDF of her with flowers in her hand is a picture of her lying dead where she was killed. Someone put flowers in her hand and on her head before they let the news photographers come in and take her photo. Her killer ran away but was arrested the next day after a knife fight with the police. It must have been quite a true crime story.

Crowds blocked the streets of Rome to see her funeral procession, Thousands of people came out and many of them knelt before her casket or kissed it as it passed by.

St. Agostina Pietrantoni, and Sts. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Didacus, and Stanislaus Kostka, pray for us.
 
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St. Agostina, pray for us!

Thank you for sharing about her @Tis_Bearself. She is a saint that I had not heard of. Especially admirable is her willingness to forgive her murderer. I will need to ask her intercession the next time I have trouble forgiving a grudge over something much more trivial!
 
I’m a little surprised she isn’t better known as she is a patron saint of nurses. I suspect in USA she is overshadowed by Mother Cabrini.

Edited to add, one other interesting thing about her is that she wasn’t canonized as a “virgin and martyr” but as a non-martyr (confessor). Apparently her murder was not considered to be in hatred of the faith. Some sources characterize it as a rape attempt, others say he was angry at her because she had taken his knife away from him during an earlier hospitalization. He had been in prison 4 times so I figure he was just your typical violent criminal, or given the state of mental health care then, he might have had some undiagnosed/ untreated mental illness.
 
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