Venerable Mary Magdalen Bentivoglio

Mary Magdalen Bentivoglio, OSC (Italian: Maria Magdalena Bentivoglio, 29 July 1834 – 18 August 1905) was an Italian Poor Clare. She was sent to the United States to found the first convent of the order in the country. She eventually established three of them before her death. Her beatification process has been opened and she has been granted the title of Venerable. She was born Anna Maria Bentivoglio in Rome, the twelfth child of Count Domenico Bentivoglio of Bologna and of Angela Sandreda, an aristocrat of French descent, who called her Annetta. Her father was an officer in the Grande Armée during the Napoleonic Wars who later became a general in the Papal Army and Governor of Rome. As a young girl, she and her older sister Elena were enrolled at the school in the city run by the Society of the Sacred Heart, where another sister, Agata, was a religious sister. When her sister was sent to teach at the Society's school in Turin in 1842, Bentivoglio was transferred to that school, where she studied for the next six years. Bentivoglio grew up into a beautiful and independent young woman. After the death of her father (1851) and her mother (1860), however, out of regard for the count's service Pope Pius IX took responsibility for her and her two remaining unmarried sisters, Constanza and Matilda, and placed them under the guardianship of Edoardo Cardinal Borromeo, who established the young women in a monastery for the sake of propriety. Drawn to life in an enclosed religious order committed to strict poverty, when her two sisters entered the convent of San Lorenzo in Panisperna, the first Poor Clare monastery in the City of Rome, which followed the Rule of St. Clare as modified by Pope Urban IV, Anna Maria also sought admission. She was received as a postulant on 16 July 1864 and received the religious habit on 4 October 1865, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi.