Maria Crocifissa Di Rosa - born as Paola Francesca Di Rosa - was an ItalianRoman Catholicprofessed religious and the founder of the Ancelle della carità. Di Rosa worked first at her father's spinning mill where she - with his encouragement - tended to the spiritual and material needs of the female workers while gathering several women to dedicate their collective efforts to caring for the poor; this formed the basis for the establishment of her religious congregation. Her apostolate prioritized tending to the ill in hospitals and to soldiers going to the front. Her beatification was celebrated in mid-1940 and Pope Pius XIIcanonized her over a decade later on 12 June 1954.
Life
Paola Francesca Di Rosa was born on 6 November 1813 in Brescia as one of nine children born to the richindustrialist Clemente Di Rosa and Countess Camilla Albani. Di Rosa was educated by the Visitation Sisters in their convent in Brescia; she left school after her mother died in 1824. She began working in her father's large spinning mill in Acquafredda where she took an instant notice of the working conditions; she became the manager when she turned nineteen. She began caring for the female workers and devoted herself to looking after their material and spiritual needs which was something that her father encouraged her to do. Her father began searching for suitors to have her married, but she turned each of them down. Di Rosa was upset that her father did this and confessed her disappointment to the priest Faustino Pinzoni who then spoke to her father to tell him that his daughter had another vocation in mind. Di Rosa lived at home for the next decade increasing her involvement in various forms of social work. Brescia suffered from a cholera epidemic in 1836 and Di Rosa went to tend to ill in the local hospital. It was also around this stage that she directed a home for mute and deaf women and in 1840 began gathering a small group of women that would later evolve into her future religious congregation. Her order became known as the Ancelle della carità and she later took her religious name and was vested in the habit after undergoing her formation and making her profession in 1852. Di Rosa directed her order to caring for the poor as well the sick since those were the main focus of her religious apostolate; she once said to her colleagues that "I suffer from seeing suffering". Her order received papal approval from Pope Pius IX in 1850 after having received diocesan approval from the Bishop of Brescia Carlo Domenico Ferrari in 1843. Di Rosa died at a hospital in Brescia on 15 December 1855 after suffering from a prolonged illness.
