Teodora Fracasso
Italian nun (1901-1927)
Teodora Fracasso, OCD (17 January 1901 - 25 December 1927) - in religion, Elia di San Clemente - was an Italian Catholic nun in the Carmelites. Fracasso once had the name of "Agnes" during a stint in the Third Order of Saint Dominic. Fracasso's inclinations to become a nun stemmed from her childhood after having had a vision in 1911 in which Thérèse of Lisieux told her that she would become a nun; this realization came a decade later when she entered the convent in her native Bari where she remained for the remainder of her life.
Her beatification cause was opened on 11 September 1980 and she became titled as a Servant of God when the cause commenced and this led to the confirmation of her heroic virtue which allowed for Pope John Paul II to name her as Venerable. Pope Benedict XVI later approved her beatification which Cardinal José Saraiva Martins presided over on 18 March 2006 on the pope's behalf in the Bari Cathedral.
Life
Teodora Fracasso was born on 17 January 1901 in Bari as the third of nine children (four died as infants) to Giuseppe Fracasso and Pasqua Cianci; she received her baptism on 21 January in the San Giacomo parish church from her paternal uncle Carlo Fracasso. Fracasso had at least four sisters; her elder sisters were Prudence and Anna and her little sisters were Teodora Domenica and Nicola. Her father worked as a painter and decorator while her mother was a housewife. Fracasso received her Confirmation in 1903 from the Archbishop of Bari-Bitonto Giulio Vaccaro.
In 1906 she claimed to have seen a beautiful woman in a dream moving among rows of blooming lilies who then disappeared in a sudden beam of light.
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This entry incorporates text from “Teodora Fracasso” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.