Blessed Leonella Sgorbati

Leonella Sgorbati, born Rosa Maria Sgorbati, (9 December 1940 – 17 September 2006) was an Italian religious sister of the Consolata Missionaries who served in the missions in both Kenya and in Somalia. She was murdered in Somalia not long after the Regensburg lecture of Pope Benedict XVI and after having worked on the continent for over three decades. Her main attention was on nursing and educating prospective nurses while she also tended to the needs of children in a children's hospital that she frequented. In 2008 her cross was deposited in the San Bartolomeo all'Isola church. She was beatified on 26 May 2018 in Piacenza. Rosa Maria Sgorbati was born on 9 December 1940 in Gazzola near Piacenza as the last of three children to Carlo Sgorbati and Giovannina (called Teresa) Vigilini. Her baptism was celebrated moments after her birth in the San Savino parish church. The Sgorbati family later relocated to Milan on 9 October 1950 for her father to find work; he died on 16 July 1951. In her teens, she desired to become a religious sister working in the missions, though (at age sixteen when she announced it) her mother did not approve of this choice and asked that she wait until she turned 20. At time, she joined the Consolata Missionary Sisters in San Fre in Cuneo on 5 May 1963, began her postulancy on 20 May, and her novitiate on 21 November 1963 in Nepi and took the religious name Leonella. She made her initial profession of vows on 22 November 1965 and her perpetual profession in November 1972. Sgorbati underwent a nursing course in England from 1966 until 1968 before being sent in September 1970 to Kenya. From 1970 until 1983 she served at the Consolata Hospital Mathari in Nyeri and at the Nazareth Hospital in Kiambu on the outskirts of Nairobi acting as a midwife for a time. In mid-1983 she started her advanced studies in nursing and in 1985 became the principal tutor at the school of nursing attached to Nkubu Hospital in Meru.