Blessed Stephana de Quinzani

At the age of fifteen, she embraced the institute of the Third Ord er of Saint Dom Saint-Dominique Founder of the order whose rule Benvenuta follows and intercessor for her healing. inic, in which she entirely subdued her flesh through fasts, vigils, hairshirts, and flagellations; by cultivating all kinds of virtues in her soul, she arrived in a short time at the pinnacle of religious perfection. To thwart the attacks of the tempter, the enemy of the human race, she did not shrink from the most energetic means: she went so far as to roll her body on thorns.

She had no desires or aspirations other than for God, so powerful was the love with which she burned for Him. The mystery of the Passion touched her so deeply that she wished with all her heart to become conformed to the Crucified One. It appears that she obtained what she desired: the torments that the Savior suffered for the redemption of the human race, she felt them every Friday in her own body for forty years; she herself affirmed this. She also experienced an interior pain that pressed upon her with the effect of a wheel crushing her heart. Several witnesses affirmed having seen the impression of the sacred stigmata on her body.

She brought back from the Eucharistic banquet, which was daily for her, such joy of soul and body that, thanks to the strength she drew from this nourishment, it is said she sometimes went forty days without taking any other. Of extreme charity toward the poor, she would give them even her own clothes. The fame of her holiness was great even in neighboring cities that would have liked to call her into their midst, but she declared that she wished to live and die only in an obscure place.

In her desire to work for the glory of God, she welcomed the young girls who came to visit her and applied herself to training them in religion and piety; when she had inspired in them the desire for religious life, she erected, not without great worries and great hardships, a monastery of her Order, under the invocation of Saint Paul, near Soncino, in the dio Soncino Town where the saint founded her monastery and passed away. cese of Cremona. She go Crémone City of monastic formation and first place of exile. verned it for several years most holily. Finally, filled with merits and the most extraordinary favors from heaven, such as ecstasies, prophecies, apparitions, and miracles, she fell asleep in the Lord on January 2, 1530, at the age of seventy-three.

Benedict XI Benoît XIII Pope who established the Institute as a religious Order in 1725. II approved her cult and granted, by apostolic authority, that her feast be celebrated with office and mass throughout the Order of Preachers and in the di Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs Mendicant religious order founded by Saint Dominic. oceses of Brescia and Cremona. The monastery of Saint Paul which she had founded was suppressed: the inhabitants of Soncino still honor her and regard her as their protectress before God, and more than once they have experienced the effects of her protection.

SAINT FRITZ. (Se e the Suppl SAINT FRITZ Mentioned at the end of the text, likely an external reference or another saint. ement at the end of this volume.)