Mary Magdalen Bentivoglio

Mary Magdalen Bentivoglio, OSC (, 29 July 1834 – 18 August 1905) was an Italian Poor Clare. She was sent to the United States to found the first convent of the order in the country. She eventually established three of them before her death. Her beatification process has been opened and she has been granted the title of Venerable.

Life

Early life She was born Anna Maria Bentivoglio in Rome, the twelfth child of Count Domenico Bentivoglio of Bologna and of Angela Sandreda, an aristocrat of French descent, who called her Annetta. Her father was an officer in the Grande Armée during the Napoleonic Wars who later became a general in the Papal Army and Governor of Rome. As a young girl, she and her older sister Elena were enrolled at the school in the city run by the Society of the Sacred Heart, where another sister, Agata, was a religious sister. When her sister was sent to teach at the Society's school in Turin in 1842, Bentivoglio was transferred to that school, where she studied for the next six years.

Bentivoglio grew up into a beautiful and independent young woman.

Evansville Bentivoglio made her last foundation in Evansville, Indiana, in 1897, due to a bequest from a relative of one of the nuns. Appointing Constanza as abbess of the Omaha monastery, she led seven other nuns there to found the new monastery, which was dedicated on 12 August of that year, then the feast day of St. Clare.