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Image of Blessed Némésia Valle

Blessed Nemesia Valle

Birth: June 26, 1847
Death: December 18, 1916
Beatification: April 25, 2004

Giulia Nemesia Valle (1847-1916) was born in Aosta, Italy, the first child of Anselmo Valle and Cristina Dalbar. She was schooled, catechized, and prepared for the Sacraments at home by a priest who was a friend of the family. At age eleven, Giulia was sent to a boarding school of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Jeanne-Anne Thouret in Besancon , France. There she learned French and gained household skills.
  On September 8, 1866 her father accompanied her to the order's novitiate at the Monastery of Saint Margaret in Vercelli. During Giulia's formation, she began to pray a prayer that would remain with her for the rest of her life: "Jesus, empty me of myself, let me be clothed in you. Jesus, for you I live and for you I die..." At the end of her novitiate, she received the religious name Nemesia, after the Roman martyr Nemesius, a deacon who was beheaded c. 260 because of his conversion to Christianity.
  Sister Nemesia was sent to Saint Vincent's Insitute at Tortona, where she worked in the elementary school, the boarding school, and the orphanage. At age forty she was elected superior of her community.
    After 36 years at Tortona, she moved to Borgano, near Turin, to work with novices in a new province of the Sisters of Charity. In the thirteen years before her death, she helped to form about five hundred novices.
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Image of Saint Catherine Laboure

SAINT CATHERINE LABROURE

On July 27, 1947, His Holiness Pius XII among the number of Saints, St. Catherine Laboure whom she was pleased to name: THE SAINT OF SILENCE.

Zoe Laboure was born on May 2, 1806 in the town of Fainles-Moutiers, of peasant parents who nurtured their children with love and mutual help and allowed God to reign in the family. At a tender age of nine, Zoe lost her dear mother, but this loss led her to take refuge in the boundless love of Mary.

Even in her younger years, Zoe manifested a great love for prayer and penance and at the age of nineteen, she strongly felt the call of God through a strange dream picturing an old priest beckoning her to offer herself to God through the person of the sick poor. This old priest in her dream became very important to her in her life because she discovered later that he was St. Vincent de Paul, the founder of the Daughters of Charity, where she was admitted as a postulant on April 21, 1830 and was consequently named Sister Catherine.
As a seminary Sister (novice in other congregations), she was a model of humility, simplicity, charity, renunciation and holy obedience. A special and ordinary favor dawned upon her life on that wonderful night of July 19, 1830 when the Blessed Mother appeared to her, seated in the Director's chair in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity Motherhouse in Rue de Bac, Paris. Sister Catherine kneeling with her hands resting on the Blessed Mother's knees listened carefully and prayerfully during the intimate conversation on the mission entrusted to her by our Lady. "Come to the foot of this altar, there graces will be poured on all those who ask for them with confidence and fervor. They will be poured out on the great and the humble..." the Lady assured her.

On the third apparition on November 27, Sister Catherine was commissioned to have a medal struck after the models shown to her. "Those who wear it will receive great graces; abundant graces will be given to those who have confidence" our Lady told her. This is the Miraculous Medal.

Then it was 1876. the moment to speak has come; the Blessed Virgin released her from her silence and before her last breath on December 31, 1876, Sister Catherine confided the story to the Superior of the house of Reifully, Sister Dufes.

Fifty-six years later, Cardinal Verdier authorized the exhumation with a view of her beatification. This took place in the presence of two doctors, the Superior General and other witnesses. Just as she had been laid to rest years ago, her limbs were supple; the pupils of her eyes are blue. Now her body is placed in a glass reliquary in the Chapel of the Motherhouse of the Daughters of Charity in Rue de Bac, at the altar of the Blessed Mother in the very place where more than a century earlier, Mary had appeared to her.