Bl. Maria Gabriella Sagheddu

Maria Sagheddu was born in 1914 into a shepherd family in Dorgali, Sardinia. People who knew her as a girl remembered her as stubborn, critical and quick to say no, though she usually did what was asked in the end.

In her late teens she became more serious about her faith and joined Catholic Action, a lay movement. At twenty-one she entered the Trappist monastery at Grottaferrata near Rome. Trappists are Cistercian monks and nuns who follow a strict rule of silence, prayer and work.

Her abbess asked the nuns to pray for Christian unity, at the request of a French priest, Paul Couturier, who promoted the cause. Sister Maria Gabriella offered her life for it. Soon afterwards she fell ill with tuberculosis, and she died in 1939 at twenty-five. John Paul II beatified her in 1983, at the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

She was not naturally docile. Those who knew her said she "obeyed while grumbling". Her holiness was a temperament slowly given over, not a gentle one by birth.

Maria Gabriella Sagheddu was beatified in 1983.

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