Gentle Reader, please accept our apologies for posting on this great saint a day late. Yesterday as every year, Saint Ubaldesca coincided with Saint Augustine, Apostle to the English. So, with apologies to the great Carmelite saint Mary Magdalene de Pazzi, her near neighbour, and today's feast of the altar, we now offer her to your undivided devotion. The painting illustrated is in the possession of the Museum of Saint John in Clerkenwell. It is of course due to the late date of the painting that our Saint is shown wearing a black habit, not red, see below.
Saint Ubaldesca Taccini represents the perfection of female service in the Order of Saint John.
Born at Castello di Calcinaia, in the county of Pisa in 1136, to farming stock, her parents pious people who practiced the virtues of obedience and silence, qualities they encouraged in our Saint from infancy. She learnt to pray constantly and practiced bodily mortifications, a spirituality which seems so foreign to our modern ears, but which throughout Europe produced the great age of Christendom, in the ashes alone of which we live now.
This life of virtue instilled into Ubaldesca a profound sense of charity and kindness, and she gave regularly to the Poor – having so little herself she frequently gave only time and understanding, often the most cherished gifts even by those who have no material goods. We see in all this the true and full vocation of womanhood.
The essential practice of examination of conscience led her to seek, in prayer for guidance, the true form her vocation should take.
One day while baking the bread, as if miraculously, she had a vision of an angel, who told her to seek admission to our Sisters of Saint John of Jerusalem of Carraia in Pisa. Knowing how poor her family was, and unable to provide the usual dowry, she doubted, but was assured by the angel that the Reverend Mothers were so rich they had no need of any dowry but her virtues, which, to dispel her further doubt, the Holy Spirit would provide where she lacked.“There is no woman in Pisa who will be more full of virtues than you. And because of your merits, the city will be delivered from great perils,” the angel told her. Pious as they were, her parents, through love of God and faith in their only daughter, took her the next day to Pisa.
Ubaldesca was received immediately, unusually, into the red habit with the black cloak of the Order (it was still red before the loss of Rhodes), the holy Mothers, who lived the Rule of St Augustine, thrilled with their new Sister, as they had been expecting her, a premonition of her holiness.
There was a miracle connected with this joyous moment. In her joy and haste after the angel’s visit, Ubaldesca had forgotten the loaves in the bread oven. The next day, hungry and thinking to be annoyed at the waste, her parents found the loaves warm and perfectly baked.
The monastery of the Ladies was attached to a hospital, or hospice, named also after Saint John, caring for the poor and sick, and it was here that our Saint spent 55 years of her life, in prayer, fasting, penance and total dedication to the sufferings of Our Lords the Sick. What a true example to those of us who seek high office and worldly preferment! Here we see genuine heroism – “she spent 55 years doing one thing well.” In the many periods of hardship in the convent Ubaldesca supported her sisters and their patients by tireless begging. People came from all the surrounding country to seek her aid and motherly comfort.
At this time came the second miracle of her religious vocation. One year, after the long solemn liturgy of Good Friday, which obviously the Poor of the Hospital all attended, an elderly woman asked her for water, as she was fainting. Ubaldesca brought it quickly, and the woman then asked her to bless it. Taken aback, Ubaldesca asker her if she was joking, but the woman insisted, and seeing her weakly pallor, she made the sigh of the Cross over the cup. “But this is wine!” exclaimed the woman, tasting it. Ubaldesca begged her to tell no one, but, as Mgr Ducaud-Bourget says, to ask such a thing of a woman is to want more than a miracle, and soon the whole convent knew! The cup she had used was preserved as a relic of this miracle, and in paintings she is shown carrying it.
Ubaldesca had a great devotion, in the long tradition of our Order, to the Passion of Our Blessed Lord, and had with her own hands erected a set of wooden Crosses in the garden of the Convent, which survived for some 500 years after her death. As she made her way round these Stations she would be surrounded by a fragrance of sweet perfume.
At the end of her life, an accident at a building yard while begging on the road left our Saint badly wounded in the head. Refusing treatment from her sisters it quickly became infected, and she approached death. Her friend Fra’ Doctus de Oculis, a professed Chaplain of the Order, and priest of the Holy Sepulchre in Pisa, who had wished to be with her at her last moment, arrived too late, as she had herself predicted in a vision, and surrounded by the abbess and all her sisters, on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity 1206, the 28thMay, Saint Ubaldesca went finally to see in Heaven the spouse she had loved so much in the Poor on earth.
Fra’ Doctus kept the body for a week, hoping for a miraculous sign. On the seventh day he saw her soul carried up among a chorus of angels. At her funeral, grief was turned to joy as 22 invalids who had been carried along in the procession were all cured.
Several recorded miracles of healing in the town, small things, showing great mercy to the petty sufferings of man, followed in the years after her death.
Her holy relics were kept at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Pisa, and despite the convent and some reliquaries being destroyed by the revolutionary fervour which accompanied Napoleon, continue to be greatly venerated. They were translated to her home parish of St John the Baptist in Calcinaia in 1924.
In 1586 Grand Master Loubenx de Verdalle had brought several relics of our dear Saint to Malta, and in 1629 the elderly Grand Master Antoine de Paule built a parish church in her honour at Paola, the new town he had begun building a few years before. Ubaldesca has thus been a part of the Order’s daily spirituality for many generations.
Saint Ubaldesca, pray for us.
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