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Today, we look at the life of a Twentieth Century missionary-martyr, Blessed Leonella Sgorbati.
Rosa Maria Sgorbati was born on December 9, 1940 in Gazzola, Piacenza, Italy, eldest of three children. In 1950, the family relocated to Milan for her father to find work, but he died in July of 1951.
When she was sixteen, Rosa expressed a desire to become a Religious Sister and work in the missions. Her mother, however, did not approve and asked her to wait until she turned twenty. Rosa followed her mother’s wishes, and in May of 1963, she joined the Consolata Mission Sisters. She made her perpetual profession of vows in November of 1972 and took the name Leonella.
Sr. Leonella took nursing courses in England from 1966 to 1968, and then she went to Kenya, East Africa in September of 1970. From 1970 to 1983, she served in the Consolata Hospital Mathari in Nyeri and at the Nazareth Hospital in Kiambu on the outskirts of Nairobi as a nurse midwife.
In mid-1983, Sr. Leonella started her advanced nursing studies, and in 1985, she became the principal tutor at the school of nursing affiliated with Nkubu Hospital in Meru. In November of 1993, she was elected the regional superior of her order in Kenya, a position she held until 1999.
During a sabbatical in 2000 and then in 2001, she spent several months in Mogadishu, Somalia looking at the potential to start a school of nursing in the hospital. In 2002, she opened the Hermann Gmeiner School of Registered Community Nursing with her in charge. In 2002, the first 34 nurses graduated with certificates from the World Health Organization.
On September 17, 2006, as Sr. Leonella was crossing a street by the hospital to have lunch with some other Sisters, two gunmen emerged from a taxi and shot her in the back three or four times. They also killed her guard-driver, a father of four.
As she lay dying on an operating table in the SOS Hospital, she whispered to another Sister of her order, “I forgive; I forgive; I forgive.”
On May 26, 2018, Pope Francis beatified Sr. Leonella. Blessed Leonella is a patron of nurses and missionaries, and her feast day is September 17th.
