St. Maria Domenica Mazzarello, Co-Foundress of the Salesian Sisters

Who was St. Maria Mazzarello?

St. Maria Domenica Mazzarello was a peasant girl from the hills of Piedmont who became, with St. John Bosco, the co-foundress of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, the Salesian Sisters. She had little schooling and worked in the fields until she was twenty-three. Yet she led a congregation that, within nine years, was sending sisters across the ocean to Argentina and Uruguay. She died at 44 and was canonized in 1951. We keep her feast on May 13.

Her life

A farm girl of Mornese

Maria Domenica was born on May 9, 1837, at Mornese in the Monferrato hills, the eldest of seven children in a family of farmers. She worked the fields and vineyards beside her father, Giuseppe. In 1855 she joined the Daughters of the Immaculate, an association of devout young women in the parish, whose confessor was the priest Don Domenico Pestarino.

Typhus, and a new road

In 1860 typhus broke out in Mornese. Don Pestarino asked Maria to nurse sick relatives, and she caught the disease on August 15 of that year. She recovered, but she was too weak to go back to the fields. With her friend Petronilla she learned dressmaking and opened a small sewing workshop for the village girls. The workshop soon became a Sunday oratory, and then a home for orphan girls. Maria taught the girls to sew, to pray and to love Jesus, all at the same table.

Meeting Don Bosco

In the autumn of 1864, Don Bosco came to Mornese with his boys on one of their walking trips. Maria heard him speak and came away certain: "Don Bosco è un santo, e io lo sento," she said, "Don Bosco is a saint, and I feel it." He in turn saw in the little group of Mornese the start of something he had been praying over, a work for girls like his work for boys.

The young women formed a community of their own in October 1867. On August 5, 1872, Maria and ten companions made their first profession before the bishop of Acqui, with Don Bosco present. The new congregation took the name Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, and Maria, against her protests, was made superior.

Mother of a growing family

Maria governed with common sense and good cheer. She asked her sisters for hard work, simplicity and a joy that came from a clean conscience. In 1879 the motherhouse moved from Mornese to Nizza Monferrato. Meanwhile the first sisters had already sailed for South America with the Salesian missionaries, and more followed to Argentina, Uruguay and Patagonia.

Mother Mazzarello caught pleurisy and died at Nizza on May 14, 1881, at the age of 44.

Canonization

Pope Pius XI beatified her on November 20, 1938, and Pius XII canonized her on June 24, 1951, together with St. Emilie de Vialar, foundress of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition. The canonization bull praised both women for the schools, workshops and orphanages they opened for poor girls, and for sending their daughters to distant missions.

Symbols of St. Maria Mazzarello in art

She lived in the age of photography, and painters show her as she looked in her last years. Look for:

• The black Salesian habit with a wide white collar and black veil: the dress of the early Daughters of Mary Help of Christians.
• A statue or image of Mary Help of Christians: the title of Our Lady under which she and Don Bosco placed the congregation.
• A crucifix or a small book in her hands.
• Girls around her: the young people for whom the sisters were founded.

In Salesian churches she is often painted beside Don Bosco or in glory above a crowd of girls. The altarpiece of her chapel in Turin shows her lifted up on clouds.

Where St. Maria Mazzarello is honored

Her body rests in a glass urn under the altar of her chapel in the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Turin, the church Don Bosco built, near the tomb of Don Bosco himself. At Mornese pilgrims visit her birthplace, the Valponasca farmhouse and the old college where the first sisters lived. Nizza Monferrato keeps the house where she died. See the feast day calendar for other May saints and the patron saints index.

Prayer to St. Maria Mazzarello

The Salesian family prays to her in its own novenas, but there is no single traditional prayer we can quote here. We can make our own the words she heard in a vision of a large house full of girls at play: "A te le affido," "I entrust them to you." Let us ask St. Maria Mazzarello to pray for girls and young women, for teachers and for the Salesian Sisters around the world: St. Maria Mazzarello, pray for us.