Luigia Tincani, our Mother Foundress

A fervent dynamic young woman, Luigia Tincani was born in Chieti on 25th March 1889 and died on 31st May 1976. At the beginning of the twentieth century she took part in the risings of lay movements and animated them thanks to her special intuition of woman’s new social as well as professional tasks. She treasured her own religious vocation that found its realization in a form that was prophetic in those days. Indeed she felt herself called upon to serve culture in all possible places where culture is developing and where education is provided.
Luigia Tincani’s vocation had no external visible signs.  It was such as to innovate the conception itself of feminine religious vocation. Indeed she combined stability and professional skills, the cell and the wide world, the sense of home and that of frontier by harmoniously combining old as well as new elements in her ideal of religious life.
In 1924 Luigia Ticani brought into life the family of the  School-Missionary Sisters, but she did not stop working in the heart of the Church, as she was entrusted with delicate offices by Pius XI, Pius XII and Paul VI. Indeed she was one of the founding Members of the Committee examining school-problems at the Central Department for Catholic Schools and Institutes of Italy. This work was under the auspices of  the Papal Congregation for Seminaries and Universities
During the last years of her life Mother Tincani  was consumed by severe suffering due to illness. These years were the crowning witness of her self-offering attitude. She would always offer her suffering for the Church, for the Pope: everything, always! It was then that she was genuinely able to repeat St Catherine of Siena’s words. “My own life is consumed drop by drop  for the sake of my sweet bride, the Church. I’m consumed this way as did  our glorious martyrs through the shedding of  their own blood”.