Taken from Beata Giuseppina Vannini. L’amore dà la vita by Gianfranco Grieco (Edizioni Messagero Padua)

Beata Giuseppina Vannini

The mother called to her all her spiritual daughters. She spoke to them one by one, addressing to them affectionate words, and at the end a special blessing. The names of Jesus and Mary were repeated on her lips. During the night, at roundabout 2.30am of the twenty-third day of the month, her Camilla who helped her after the two sleepless nights of Sister Giuseppina, noted that the Mother was giving out a deep sigh. She immediately ran to her bedside and received on her shoulder the resting head of the mother who thus gave up her soul to God.

The date was 23 February 1911. Mother Giuseppina had lived fifty-one, seven months and sixteen days. Nineteen years had passed since she had brought about, in the little house of Via Merulana, together with Father Luigi Tezza, the foundation of the Congregation of the Daughters of St. Camillus.

While awaiting the dawn the religious who were nearest to the mother arranged the coffin and dressed her in her religious habit marked by a red cross. She seemed to be asleep. A motherly smile lit up her face. The whole of the community gathered together in the next room – one can read in the chronicle, folio 47 of 23 February 1911, 2.15 am – and recited the whole of the rosary between the suffrages and tears and then stayed at prayer until the morning. The meditation of that day contained the resurrection of the daughter of Jairus. ‘It was Jesus who wanted to be the first to bring to our sorrowful bodies his words of comfort. “Why are you troubled and weeping? The girl is not dead but sleeping!’ O comforting words of Jesus, words of life, of truth, the foundation of our faith and our hope, what comfort you bring to our hearts…!’

The coffin was placed in the parlour and over the next days very many sisters and ecclesiastical and civil figures came to pay tribute to it. On the morning of 24 February, at 6am ‘with the corpse present’, the requiem Mass was celebrated in the funeral room. The coffin was then taken to the chapel for the funeral. In tears, all her spiritual daughters gave their final farewell to the Mother. At 14.00, on the same day, the coffin was taken to Campo Verano.

Father Vido, the Superior General of the Camillians, Father Alfonso Maria Andrioli, the Vicar General, Father Giuseppe da Monterotondo, and a group of women religious of the institute who were broken hearted at the death of their ‘young Mother’, accompanied the coffin.

She was buried in the tomb that she herself had bought for the daughters of the Institute.

Exhumed in 1932, the coffin was moved to the church of the mother house of the Daughters of St. Camillus in Acqua Bullicante, between Casilina and Prenestina.

At the centre of the floor a stone placed on the tomb bore the following text: ‘Piety and love of Daughters – here they wanted her – so that she should stay and survive – amongst them – Mother, Teacher, Guide’.