MODERN SAINT FOR THE HOLY SPIRIT

 

 

A friend of Pope Leo XIII and the teacher of St. Gemma Galgani, BLESSED ELENA GUERRA is known for her spiritual writings and her passionate devotion to the Holy Spirit. When Pope St. John XXIII beatified her in 1959, he called her the “modern day apostle of the Holy Spirit”.

She was born into a noble family in Lucca, Italy in 1835, one of six children. She was well-educated and formed in her faith. In her childhood she was known to be talented but timid in nature.

 For much of her 20s, Elena was bedridden for eight years with a serious illness, a time in which she spent meditating on Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers.

 During a pilgrimage to Rome with her father after her recovery, she felt called to consecrate herself to God.

 She attended the third public session of Vatican I in April 1870 and in June met Pope Pius IX.  She was so moved by seeing the Holy Father, that upon returning to Lucca, she vowed to offer her life for the pope.

 Elena wrote more than a dozen letters to Pope Leo XIII between 1895 and 1903 in which she urged him to exhort all Catholics to call upon the Holy Spirit in prayer.

He heeded her request and published three documents on the Holy Spirit, including a letter asking the entire Church to pray a novena to the Holy Spirit leading up to Pentecost in 1895, and his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Divinum Illud Munus, in 1897.

 “Pentecost is not over. In fact, it is continually going on in every time and in every place, because the Holy Spirit desired to give Himself to all men and all who want Him can always receive Him, so we do not have to envy the apostles and the first believers; we only have to dispose ourselves like them to receive Him well, and He will come to us as He did to them”, Elena wrote.

 Against the wishes of her family, in her mid-30s Guerra formed a religious community dedicated to education, which eventually became the Oblates of the Holy Spirit. One of her students, St. Gemma Galgani, wrote in her autobiography about the strong spiritual impact of her education by the Oblate sisters. Bl. Elena personally taught the future saint French and Church history and exempted her from the monthly school fee when her father fell into bankruptcy.

 At one point she corresponded with St. Arnold Janssen SVD (d.1909), a German-Dutch Catholic priest and missionary. He founded the Society of the Divine Word, a Catholic missionary religious congregation, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries, as well as two congregations for women. He was canonized on 5 October 2003, by Pope John Paul II.

True for many spiritual founders, Bl. Elena faced difficulties in the last years of her life when some of her sisters accused her of bad administration, leading her to resign from her duties as superior.  She died on Holy Saturday on April 11, 1914. Her tomb is located in Lucca in the Church of Sant’Agostino. The Oblate sisters whom Bl. Elena founded are found today in Italy, Cameroon, Canada, Philippines, and Rwanda.

 St. John Bosco referred to Elena as a "golden pen" in reference to her spiritual writings.  Her feast is April 11.