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 openend and she has been granted the title of a Servant of God.
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. After the death of her father (1851) and her mother (1860), however, out of regard for the count's service Pope Pius IX took responsibility for her and her two remaining unmarried sisters, Constanza and Matilda, and placed them under the guardianship of Edoardo Cardinal Borromeo, who established the young women in a monastery for the sake of propriety. Drawn to life in an enclosed religious order committed to strict poverty, when her two sisters entered the convent of San Lorenzo in Panisperna, the first Poor Clare monastery in the City of Rome, which followed the Rule of St. Clare as modified by Pope Urban IV, Anna Maria also sought admission. She was received as a postulant on 16 July 1864 and received the religious habit on 4 October 1865, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi.
Foundress in America
In 1875, after the Papal States' seizure by the Kingdom of Italy, like other religious communities, the Monastery of San Lorenzo faced closing by the new government. At that same time, Mother Ignatius Hayes, the English foundress of the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception in Little Falls, Minnesota, sought to have a contemplative presence as part of her foundation. To this end, she went to Italy to enlist members of the cloistered Franciscan Second Order and approached the ecclesiastical authorities with this proposal. She visited the monastery in Rome, where several nuns volunteered to embark on this new venture. The Minister General of the Friars Minor, Bernardino da Portoguaro, gave his approval to the proposal and sought the permission of the Holy See to allow some nuns of the order to leave their convents to travel to America for this.
Bentivoglio, along with her sister, Constanza, was chosen to go to the United States by Pope Pius IX, who appointed Bentivoglio abbess of the new foundation and Constanza her vicaress, who were to be accompanied by a Franciscan friar, Paulino de Castellaro, who had appointed their spiritual director and chaplain. On 12 August 1875, Castellaro and Hayes went to the monastery to accompany the nuns to the Vatican Palace, where they attended the general audience of Pope Pius and received a special blessing by him. They then traveled to Nice in France, where they met the Minister General. At that point, he gave them formal documents of their commission to the endeavor and transferred the nuns from the Urbanist Observance of the Rule of St. Clare followed by the Monastery of San Lorenzo to that of the Primitive Observance, which followed the unmitigated Rule of St. Clare, and forbade corporate ownership of property by the nuns. They then went to the Poor Clare monastery in Marseille, which followed that form of the Rule of St. Clare, to familiarize themselves with its differences.