This is the corpse of Sr. Raffaella M. of the Sacred Heart. She was the foundress of the Ancelle del S. Cuore di Gesu' and was from Spain.
One can pray before her blessed corpse on the Via Piave in the charming little convent chapel of the sisters, usually closed, but where the Ss. Sacrament is often exposed.
1 comment:
Sad.Sad.Sad what has happened to her Order she founded since Vatican II.
The sisters no longer wear this beautiful habit, or any religious garb. They wear layclothes.
Also, the tiny commmunity in the USA (less than 30) are aged nuns in their 70's still pushing the worn out femminist dissident agenda in liturgy and the Church in general.
Their USA "Motherhouse" if you can call it that, "St. Rafaela Mary Center" on Coopertown Rd. in Bryn Mawr, Pa. is less that four blocks from my home.
It's an old estate the nuns bought in the 1940's, and used as their Motherhouse. Never large in numbers in the USA, there still were about 75 sisters in the USA before Vatican II, and this particular house (which also was always a retreat house), had about 25-30 sisters from the early 1950's all thru the very early 1960's.
They declined slowly, still wearing a habit of some dignified type until 1978 when they discarded it, in favor of layclothes.
The two private schools, 2 parish schools they stadded in the Philadelphia Archdiocese are all empty of sisters, though the schools still bear their name "Ancillae Academy" (Handmaids' Academy). They're gone from the 2 Italian parishes they staffed too, and have only 6 very aged nuns at their "Motherhouse" running a retreat center which is almost closed. Once they gave up the prayerful traditional retreat model, and adopted the improvised model highly charged with dissident theology and femminism, the number of faithful women coming for spiritual excercises and prayers plummeted to nearly nothing. They used to use a retreat model similar to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. No longer.
The Order will probably die out, at least in the USA (less than 30), but also down from 2,800 before Vatican II, to barely 1,100 today, all aged women.
Pray to St. Raffaela to bring her Order back to Catholic Faith and tradition, and the holy habit she gave them.
It looks like her community will not last long. And that's sad because they had a magnificent presence in the Church, in Rome and elsewhere.
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