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The Woman Who Made Herself Small — So the Sick Poor Could Be Seen
Feast Day: February 1
Early Life: Born into Poverty, Formed by It
Anna was born in High Savoy (then territory of the Kingdom of Sardinia), in Annecy, August 29, 1843. Her father, a native of Almese (Torino), died young, leaving the family in complete misery.
From the very first chapter of her life, Anna knew what poverty felt like — not as an abstraction, but as a daily reality. There was no cushion of wealth to soften the blow of her father's death. There was no grand estate to fall back on. There was simply her mother, her brother Antonio, and the hard, quiet work of surviving.
And yet, remarkably, poverty did not embitter Anna. It formed her. Despite their financial struggles, Anna's family always made time to care for those less fortunate than themselves. Her mother modeled this from the very beginning. On the day of Anna's First Communion, her mother took her to visit a poor sick person at home. It was a small act — but it planted a seed that would grow into everything Anna became.
The First Stirrings: A Novice Who Was Never Meant to Teach
Michelotti travelled across France for her studies at the Institute of the Sisters of Saint Charles and she asked to enter their novitiate. At that time, she took the name Sister Giovanna Francesca of the Visitation.
It seemed, for a moment, as though Anna's path was set. She would be a teacher. She would enter this congregation, take her vows, and spend her life in classrooms.
But God had other plans. Despite this, her path was elsewhere. Teaching, it turned out, was not her mission. Anna knew it. And the tragedy that followed — as devastating as it was — only sharpened what she already sensed.
Loss Upon Loss: Alone in the World
In 1863 she was left alone with the death of her mother and her brother Antonio. In a single blow, the two people closest to Anna in the world were gone. She was twenty years old. She had no father. Now she had no mother, no brother, and no home to speak of.
She went to her paternal relatives in Almese and later went to Turin. Turin — the great Catholic city of northern Italy, a place already overflowing with saints and holy souls in the nineteenth century — would become the center of her life. But at this point, she was simply a young woman adrift, grieving, and searching for the shape God wanted her life to take.
The Birth of a Mission: "The Lady of the Sick Poor"
It was during these years of searching that the conviction inside Anna began to crystallize into something concrete. She was "the lady of the sick poor," because she sought them out and put herself at their service.
In Annecy she met a certain Sister Catherine, a former novice of St. Joseph, who shared the same feelings. Together they began in Lyon, in a private care for the sick poor at home. This was the embryo — the very first, fragile beginning of what would become a congregation. Two women, no institutional backing, no money, no name — simply a shared conviction that someone needed to go to the sick poor, and that they were the ones God was calling to do it.
With the permission of the Archbishop, she took the religious habit and professed her temporary vows. But the work was fragile from the start. The nascent congregation was short-lived because of the war between France and Prussia in 1870. The Franco-Prussian War tore through everything. Anna was forced to return to Annecy, and the small community she had begun scattered.
It was not the end. It was only a setback — and Anna did not accept setbacks as final.
Turin: The Tomb of Francis de Sales and the Birth of a Congregation
After the war, Anna made her way to Turin. She spent her time at the tomb of Francis de Sales. She used her free time to read and meditate on sacred scripture and worked to spread the message of Jesus Christ to the poor, as well as to bring them the sacraments.
Francis de Sales — the great Doctor of the Church, the patron of writers and the apostle of gentle, joyful holiness — had lived and died in this very city. His tomb was a place of profound spiritual nourishment for Anna. She prayed there often, and it was there, according to tradition, that she received an interior confirmation that her work — the care of the sick poor — would be born in Turin.
To work with the poor and the sick, in 1875 she established a new congregation to devote efforts to them alone. She named it the Little Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the Sick Poor. Their principal mission is to visit and tend the lonely sick who were suffering and dying at home.
This was not a congregation built around grand works of charity — hospitals, schools, orphanages. Anna's vision was quieter, and in many ways more radical. She wanted her sisters to go into the homes of the sick poor — the people who were dying alone, behind closed doors, with no one to pray with them, no one to bring them the sacraments, no one to hold their hand. The sisters have houses in Italy, Romania and Madagascar — a testament to how far that humble vision has reached, more than a century after its founding.
The Early Years: Tears, Struggles, and the Cry to God
The founding of a religious congregation is never easy. For Anna, the early years were marked by poverty so severe, and setbacks so relentless, that there were moments when the entire work nearly collapsed.
The top cleric and the doctor advised the community to close the school. The institutional support was not there. The money was not there. But Oratorian Father Felice Carpignano came to encourage the mother. And in the midst of this anguish, Anna was heard crying out — more than once — in the small apartment on Piazza Corpus Domini, just steps from where the work of Saint Joseph Benedict Cottolengo had first begun: "I am ready, O my dear Lord, to do your work even if it is fifty times need, but help me."
It is one of the most human prayers ever recorded in the life of a saint or blessed. Not a serene, detached surrender. A woman in tears, on her knees, begging God not to let the work die — and trusting, even in the darkness, that He would not.
The Lord listened. In 1879, a benefactress became aware of the miserable conditions in which the Little Servants lived, housed in a villa on the hill of Turin. Then, in 1882, they managed to buy their own house at Valsalice. Valsalice — a small property on the hills outside Turin — became the Mother House of the congregation. It is still there today, where Anna's relics are venerated.
Life as a Religious: Prayer, Penance, and the Rule Lived Fully
Anna did not simply found a congregation and then step back into comfort. She lived the Rule she had written — with a severity toward herself that was striking even to those who loved her.
A woman of intense prayer, she mortified her body, sleeping on the ground or on a sack of straw, stirring the soup with ash. These were not performative acts of piety. They were the quiet, daily choices of a woman who believed that the suffering of Christ required her to share in it — so that she could be closer to the very people she served.
In the congregation she was generous to the sisters, saying: "If we fail, then descend a step; if you are humiliated, ascend three." This single line reveals so much about who Anna was as a leader. She did not demand perfection without mercy. She demanded growth — and she taught her sisters that humiliation, accepted with grace, was not a defeat but a ladder.
She read and meditated the Sacred Scripture with them, recommending that they "be prudent, zealous and full of love," seeking Jesus Christ in the poor. They were to assist them materially and spiritually, encouraging, where possible, the proximity to the Sacraments. The sacraments — especially the Eucharist — were at the heart of Anna's spirituality. She wanted the sick poor to have access not only to medicine and food, but to God.
Before making a major decision, she sought the advice of confessors, and among these was Don Bosco. This is a remarkable detail. Saint John Bosco — one of the greatest saints of the nineteenth century, the man who transformed the lives of thousands of abandoned boys in Turin — was among those Anna turned to for spiritual counsel. The two shared the same city, the same era, and the same burning conviction that Christ lived in the poorest of the poor. Anna Michelotti died on February 1, 1888 — the day after Don Bosco. Even in death, their stories intertwined.
A Woman of Deep Prayer and Devotion
When asked for a particular grace, she prayed with her arms crossed, kneeling, stretching her hand toward the tabernacle. The image is striking — a woman on her knees, arms outstretched, reaching physically toward the Blessed Sacrament as though she could touch the very presence of Christ.
From France she brought a statue of the Madonna that was blessed by Archbishop Gastaldi. Every now and then, holding it in her arms, in procession to the garden with her sisters, praying, singing the Litany, exhorting everyone to pray the rosary. Her devotion to the Blessed Virgin was constant and tender — a woman who understood that the Mother of God was the first and greatest servant of the sick and suffering.
She had a deep devotion to the Passion of the Lord; on Good Friday she dined standing or kneeling, kissed the nuns' feet before sitting at table with a square of bread. On the day the Church commemorates the greatest suffering in history, Anna united herself to it — physically, ritually, with every gesture of her body.
The Final Humiliation: Stripped of Her Office
The last chapter of Anna's life is, in many ways, the most revealing.
In the last years of her life, bronchial asthma often forced the mother to bed. Deemed unfit to govern the Institute, especially in constant development, on December 26, 1887 she was removed from the office of superior general.
She was stripped of the very role she had created. The congregation she had founded — through years of tears, prayers, poverty, and struggle — was now led by someone else. It was a profound humiliation. And it came not from an enemy, but from within the very community she had built.
She accepted the humiliation, subjecting herself to the new superior that she had suggested. She did not fight. She did not bitterly resist. She accepted — and she did so with a grace that moved everyone around her.
From that day the pain increased, but she smilingly said: "For Jesus, every sacrifice is small." And: "I am about to die, but you have no fear. I will continue to help and lead the Little Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the infirm poor."
Even dying. Even stripped of her title, her authority, her health. Even then — her only concern was the work. The sick poor. The mission God had given her. She would not abandon them, even from the other side of death.
Death: February 1, 1888
A few hours before her death, yielding to the repeated insistence of the nuns, she allowed herself to be photographed. It is a small detail — but it speaks volumes. Anna, who had spent her entire life making herself invisible, who had poured every ounce of herself into the service of others, resisted even this final act of visibility. Only at the insistence of her sisters did she consent. Even at the threshold of death, her instinct was to disappear.
The one who all her life, to forget herself, had served the most vulnerable, was buried by the side of the Franciscan track, in a poor coffin, in the ground wet from rain, in a small cemetery. A poor coffin. Wet ground. A small cemetery. It was the burial of a woman who had never wanted anything for herself — and it was exactly, in every way, what she would have chosen.
"The grain of wheat" was dead — but a light of love would continue to shine through her daughters, now also active in mission lands. The Gospel of John echoes here: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." Anna Michelotti was that grain of wheat.
Beatification and Legacy
The beatification process began in Turin in 1933 and was completed on 24 October 1935. Michelotti's spiritual writings were approved by theologians on 27 November 1937, and her cause was formally opened on 6 December 1942 under Pope Pius XII, granting her the title Servant of God.
On 15 December 1966 her life of heroic virtue was recognized, and Pope Paul VI declared her to be Venerable. She was officially beatified by Pope Paul VI on 1 November 1975.
In 1999, Pope John Paul II received the Little Servants at the Vatican to mark the 125th anniversary of their founding and the 25th anniversary of Anna's beatification. He reminded the sisters: "You are called to see the Lord's face in every sick person you visit, as your foundress wrote: 'We belong to Jesus; we serve Jesus who is the incarnate and eternal truth, who never deceives us, because his promises are infallible and he will never let go unrewarded even a glass of water given out of love.'"
Today, the Little Servants have houses in Italy, Romania, and Madagascar. The grain of wheat Anna planted in the wet, cold ground of a small Turin cemetery has grown into a living congregation, still tending the sick poor — still going where no one else wants to go — more than 135 years after her death.
What Anna Michelotti Teaches Us
Blessed Anna Michelotti lived in one of the most saint-rich cities and eras in Catholic history — nineteenth-century Turin, the city of Don Bosco, Cottolengo, Cafasso, and so many others. And yet, even among that constellation of holiness, she remains largely unknown. Not because her faith was any less burning. But because she deliberately chose invisibility.
She did not want glory. She did not want recognition. She wanted only to serve — and to serve the people the world had already decided to forget. The sick poor. The ones dying alone. The ones no one visited.
Her life is a quiet, devastating rebuke to a world that measures worth by visibility. Anna Michelotti reminds us that some of the holiest work in the world is done behind closed doors — in cramped apartments, in the homes of the dying, in small congregations that the world will never hear of. And that God sees every bit of it.
A Prayer for the Intercession of Blessed Anna Michelotti
Lord God, through the intercession of Blessed Anna Michelotti, teach us to find Christ in the poorest and most forgotten of the world. When we are tempted to serve only those who can repay us, remind us of this woman who gave her entire life to the sick poor — not for recognition, but for love. May we have the courage to make ourselves small, so that others may be seen. Amen.
Blessed Anna Michelotti — pray for us.
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