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Fiorina Cecchin was born in Cittadella, Padua, Veneto in the northern part of Italy on April 3, 1877. She was the fifth of eight children of Francesco Cecchin and Antonia Germania. Her two eldest siblings died as infants.
When she was 18, Fiorina tried to join the Sisters of Saint Dorothy, but she was not accepted because the order thought her health was too fragile. Fortunately, however, when she was 19, her pastor helped her enter the Sisters of Saint Giuseppe Benedetto Cottolengo. On August 27, 1896, Fiorina became the 139th postulant of the Cottolengo Sisters that year in the Little House of Divine Providence in Turin.
In religious life, she was known as Sister Maria Carola and made her solemn religious profession on January 6, 1899.
Her first job was that of cook at a boarding school in Giaveno in the province of Turin, and later at the motherhouse in Turin.
On March 19, 1904, Sister Carola submitted a request to be considered for the foreign missions, and on January 28,1905, she left Italy with four other Cottolengo Sisters along with two Consolata Sisters for the East African nation of Kenya.
After a two-week journey by ship, the group arrived in Mombasa, a coastal city in southeastern Kenya on the Indian Ocean. There, they were asked to staff mission stations, including learning how to do basic health care, teach catechism, and teach children how to read and write. First, however, they had to learn the language of the people, Kikuyu. So, Sister Carola and the other Sisters got busy studying the culture and language of the people, all the while meeting new people and learning how to function in a society vastly different from what they were used to in Italy.
During her time in Kenya, Sister Carola served in various towns in three dioceses: Muranga, Nyeri, and Meru. Oftentimes, she would be given the responsibility of building a house for Sisters who would follow her. In each place she founded, she liked to create a vegetable garden and little courtyard to provide a homey feel.
In short time, Sister Carola became very popular with the people, for she loved them and gave her all for them. Not only did she teach the faith to children, but she also taught adults. And during World War I, she found herself nursing soldiers in military hospitals, and when the war was over, she cared for people suffering from the Spanish flu.
Unfortunately, Sister Carola developed sanguine enterocolitis that caused her pain for the rest of her life. In addition to dealing with this chronic health condition, the Consolata Sisters and the Cottolengo Sisters found themselves growing apart because of differences in the ways they did evangelization. Despite many attempts to reach harmony, the Sisters were unsuccessful. Therefore, Pope Benedict XV decided to remove the two groups of Sisters away from each other. To do this, he ordered the Cottolengo Sisters to leave the missionary area.
Sister Carola made sure the Cottolengo Sisters left from Kenya. She and one other Sister were the last of the 44 sisters to leave on October 25, 1925. Unfortunately, on November 13, 1925, Sister Carola died on board the steamship Porto Alessandretta in the Red Sea between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. After a hasty funeral on the ship, her body was wrapped in a white sheet and buried at sea.
Sister Maria Carola was beatified on November 5, 2022, in the Kinoru Stadium in Meru, Kenya. Blessed Maria Carola is a patron saint of missionaries, and her feast day is November 13.
