Blessed Angela of Foligno

(4th January)

Angela was born in Foligno in ca. 1249.  She was married at a young age to a wealthy man and had a family.  She led what she regarded as a sinful life until what seems to have been a sudden conversion  in ca. 1285.  This might have been the result of an encounter with the Blessed Peter Crisci: she records that "I used to make fun of a certain Petruccio, but now I could not do otherwise than follow his example".  She was too ashamed to make a full confession until St Francis appeared to her in a vision and exhorted her to true repentance.  Brother Arnold, a friar at San Francesco, became her confessor.

She then began a life of penance, prayer and (despite her marital status) celibacy.  When her husband and her children died suddenly (presumably in an epidemic) in ca. 1288, she became the leading light in a fraternity of lay men and women that had been formed in 1270 at San Francesco.

[Pilgrimage to Assisi in 1300]

She derived important theological insights from her mystical contemplation, which she dictated to Brother Arnold, her confessor at San Francesco.   Her writings are contained in two books:

• "The Book of Divine Consolations of the Blessed Angela of Foligno"; and
  

• "The Book of Visions and Instructions."  
  

Angela died in 1309 and was buried in San Francesco.  Her tomb immediately became the focus of a cult.  Brother Arnold wrote her biography, but despite the support of influential cardinals and despite the miracles reported at her tomb, she does not seem to have been the subject of a formal process of canonisation.  However, Pope Clement XI confirmed her cult in 1701. 

Her relics are preserved on the 2nd altar on left of San Francesco.  They were kept inside a wooden effigy until the 20th century, when they were transferred to the present reliquary.  The wooden effigy is in the sacristy.