Blessed Maria Gabriella Sagheddu was a Sardinian woman who became a Trappist sister and whose life ended in an unusual kind of martyrdom.

Maria Sagheddu was born in 1914 to a poor Italian shepherding family on the island of Sardinia. She was the fifth of eight children. Her father died when she was only five years old. Her mother and older siblings raised the strong-willed Sagheddu family. Maria was a stubborn child, and she was prone to disobedience and to criticize whatever displeased her. But Maria was bright and quick-witted. She excelled at school and loved to learn. Her love of learning led her, when she was in her late teen years, to become a catechism teacher for the local schoolchildren.

Their local pastor helped Maria fulfill her dream to enter religious life. Her family had mixed reactions to Maria’s choice, but eventually, shortly after her twenty-first birthday, Maria entered the Trappist convent in Grottaferrata near Rome. She took the name Maria Gabriella.

In the early twentieth century, the cause of Christian Unity was sweeping Europe. In an increasingly divided world, wracked by wars and violence, Western Christians began to realize that their deep divisions, fomented by the many turns of history since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, were a scandal to the rest of the world. Christ prayed on the night of his death that all his followers might be one (John 17:21), in imitation of his unity with the Father.

Sister Maria Gabriella entered a convent that had caught this fervor for Christian Unity. The Octave of Christian Unity was first proposed in 1908 for a week in January. It was further developed and renamed the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in 1935. A French priest, Abbé Paul Couturier, was widely influential in promoting this week of prayer, and he was a great apostle for ecumenism. Sr. Maria Gabriella was inspired by his witness.

During the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in 1938, Sister Maria Gabriella asked permission from her superior to offer up her life as a sacrifice for Christian Unity. Mother Superior agreed and, soon afterward, Maria Gabriella fell ill and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She suffered for eighteen months before she died in the evening between April 22 and April 23, 1939.

Maria Gabriella was recognized by John Paul II in his encyclical on Christian Unity, Ut Unum Sint (“That they may be one”) as a model of concern for Christian unity. Christian unity is not a cause for “special times” John Paul II writes, rather it is a cause for “everyone, always, and everywhere.”

Blessed Maria Gabriella Sagheddu, Trappist sister and martyr for Christian Unity—pray for us!