Featured Vincentian Blessed of the Month
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.
Patrons of Santa Isabel College - Manila
Image of Saint Louise de Marillac

SAINT LOUISE DE MARILLAC

St. Louise de Marillac, co-founder of St. Vincent de Paul of the Daughters of Charity, is declared Patroness of those who do social work. She was born on August 12, 1591. She married a relatively rich man who left her a widow with a young son while she was very young.

She became increasingly immersed under the influence of St. Vincent who discovered, along with her scruples and complexes, great generosity and burning desire to love God and be of help to others. He put her in-charge of the young women he was organizing to care for the poor sick in their homes. Under him, she trained the first recruits in the Parish home and drew up the original rules for the Company of the Daughters of Charity. She reinforced St. Vincent's desire to keep the Sisters out of the standard requirement of enclosure. She strongly supported St. Vincent's exhortation to the sisters: "Your convent will be the house of the sick; your cloister, the streets of the city and wards of the hospital; your enclosure, obedience, your grille, the fear of God; your veil, holy modesty".
St. Louise died on March 15, 1660. On her deathbed, St. Louise pleaded with her sisters, "Be diligent in serving the poor. Love the poor, honor them my children, as you would honor Christ himself".