St Maria Teresa Fasce

Maria, whose nickname growing up was Marietta, was full of life.  Even after her mother died when she was only 8 years old, she still enjoyed her life, her family, school and especially learning about God.  The Church in her community was run by Augustine Priests and Marietta learned to love the Augustine way of praying and getting closer to Jesus.  As she got older and learned more and more about Jesus she started to feel called to become a nun.  When St. Rita of Cascia was canonized a Saint, Marietta felt even more called by Jesus to enter a convent.  She joined an Augustinian monastery, which was in her country and she became a nun.  At first she was very disappointed with the way the sisters in the convent behaved, she didn’t see them taking their vows seriously and being respectful of Jesus.  She left the convent for a while, because she thought maybe she had made a mistake and that Jesus didn’t really want her to be a nun.  But after being away from the monastery for a while and praying more about her life, she returned to the monastery because she knew that was where Jesus wanted her.  Instead of complaining about the way things were happening with the other sisters, she decided to change things.  She wrote letters about the inappropriate behaviour of the sisters and she was put in charge of taking care of and teaching the new girls that were joining the monastery.  Later she was put in charge of the whole monastery.  She led the monastery with lots of rules and taught the sisters to be respectful and to follow the teachings of Saint Augustine to get closer to Jesus.  She was also a very loving, kind and gentle leader; all the sisters in the monastery loved her very much.  She worked very hard for Jesus and built a Church in honour of St. Rita and also built an orphanage for little girls who had no one to take care of them.  She had many illnesses that caused her a lot of pain, but she never let that stop her from doing what God called her to do.