Blessed Maria Schininà

Maria Schininà (10 April 1844 – 11 June 1910), also known by her religious name Maria of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was an Italian Roman Catholic nun and the founder of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1889). Her adolescence demonstrated no particular spiritual emphasis though the death of her father and the marriage of her brother prompted a sudden inner conversion that saw her reach out and collaborate with the ill and the poor; she began in 1885 the foundations for what would become the religious congregation that she set up in 1889. Her beatification cause started in 1975 and culminated in the formal beatification that occurred on 4 November 1990. Maria Schininà was born on 10 April 1844 in Ragusa to the nobles Giambattista Schininà and Rosalia Arezzo as the fifth of eight children. Her baptism was celebrated in the local parish church in that same month. Her childhood or adolescence did not demonstrate particular inclinations to faith or religion. The priest Vincenzo Di Stefano oversaw her initial education until she turned 21. Her father died in 1865 and it prompted a radical inner change to alter her own life and the 1874 marriage of the final child - a brother - prompted her to take care of her mother and to dedicate her life to the outcast as well as to the sick and the poor; she removed all of her elegant clothes and dressed like the poor while giving her clothes to the poor. Her mother later died in 1884. In 1877 the Carmelite Salvatore La Perla chose her to act as the directress of the new Pia Unione delle Figlie di Maria - she had joined it in 1875 - and attracted people to the union while wanting to lead a "true social revolution" in the light of the Gospel and its teachings while later deciding in 1885 to found a religious order upon the advice of the Franciscan Archbishop of Siracusa Benedetto La Vecchia.