Bl. Elena Aiello

Elena Aiello was born in 1895 in Montalto Uffugo, near Cosenza in Calabria, Italy. Her mother died when she was young, and she helped look after the family. In August 1920 she entered the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, but a badly treated illness left her so weak that they sent her home. She prayed to St Rita and recovered.

In 1928 in Cosenza she founded the Minim Sisters of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Their rule took the Passion of Jesus as its centre and the charity of St Francis of Paola, a fifteenth-century saint of her region, as its daily model. The sisters ran orphanages and a teacher-training school so that girls leaving the orphanage would have a future. She died in Rome in 1961, where she had gone to open a new house, and was beatified in 2011.

Legend and tradition. From November 1921, according to her biographers, she sweated blood and bore the stigmata (wounds like Christ's), especially on the Fridays of Lent and on Good Friday, with the wounds gone by Holy Saturday. The Church's beatification judged her virtues and a miracle; it did not rule on these phenomena.

Elena Aiello was beatified in 2011.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.