Pilgrims of Hope: The Ursuline Cohort

As Pope Francis opens the Holy Door for Jubilee 2025, the global Ursuline family commemorates the Fifth Centenary of St Angela Merici’s Holy Year pilgrimage to Rome and her memorable audience with Pope Clement VII. Her ecclesial journey also benchmarks the decade leading up to the foundation of the Company of St Ursula in 1535. Half a millennium later, we can recognize in the Ursuline legacy a reflection of Angela’s own ministry, tenacity and innate resiliency: Go forward willingly!
Angela was laid to rest with her pilgrim staff ready to hand. Across centuries and continents, she is ever in our midst, more alive than when she walked on earth. Collectively, we rightly celebrate the realization of her inaugural vision in the Company’s foundation on November 25, 1535. The back to back anniversaries of her major pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to Rome 1524-25, however, avert us to a phenomenal period in Angela’s own life, the decade of pilgrimage from her 1522 visit to the tomb of Osanna Andreasi in Mantua to her final pilgrimage to Varallo in 1532 with a cohort of companions.
Despite the continuum of Angela’s ministry in Brescia from her arrival in 1516 to her death in 1540, the sequence of pilgrimage suggests not only a development of her personal vocation, but also the discernment and evolution of her call as foundress of the Company. Ursuline pilgrims of hope for the 21st century, we hear, as it were, Angela’s own dynamic of discernment echoing to us from the Sacro Monte of Varallo: Act, move, believe, strive, hope, cry out to God with all your heart!
The Eyes of the Soul: Pilgrimage of Discernment in Saint Angela Merici surveys this decade of pilgrimage and its encouragement as we live the charism of the Company of St Ursula in our time. Other historic studies and spiritual reflections on Angela’s pilgrimages are available in Pilgrim 500: Collected Writings, compiled in 2024 for the 5th Centenary of Angela’s Holy Land pilgrimage.