At Florence in Tuscany, Saint Juliana Falconieri, virgin, who founded the sisters of the Order of the Servants of Mary, called Mantellate on account of their religious habit.
Lifespan: 1270–1341
Beatified: 26 July 1678 by Pope Innocent XI
Canonized: 16 June 1737 by Pope Clement XII, Rome
Memoria liturgica: 19 June
The Girl with the Mantle
Juliana possessed an undeniable gift: she was beautiful. One of those women who can turn men’s heads, whatever the age. The age in which Juliana lived was the Middle Ages, and her city was the Florence of Dante Alighieri, whose contemporary she was. A city in which, as the bitter struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines was being fought out — a clash at the highest level between tiara and crown — a force was making ever greater headway from below, eager to put its entrepreneurial genius to work. Juliana was part of that world, for her surname was Falconieri, and the Falconieri of late thirteenth-century Florence were a wealthy merchant family.
But it was not money alone that dwelt in the Falconieri palace. A richer, weightless presence lingered there too: the Christian faith, which had already led one scion of the house to strip himself of everything and consecrate himself to God. Alexis Falconieri, one of the seven founders of the Servants of Mary, was Juliana’s father’s brother, and she was captivated by her uncle’s manner of life — so far outside the pattern of a family whose business was making money.
She grew up indifferent to her own beauty, which won her marriage proposals that she declined with unfailing grace. Juliana was drawn to the religious life, and in place of the fashionable dress of Florentine women she preferred the wide dark mantle her uncle wore. The same garment was soon draped over the shoulders of other young women of the prosperous bourgeoisie who followed Juliana — women who, like her, were more inclined to serve the poor than to be deferred to by them.
They were nicknamed the Mantellate — the cloaked ones: for the Church they became the women’s branch of the Servants of Mary. Women of contemplation on their knees, and of tireless charity in the streets. Every Wednesday and Friday they ate nothing at all; every Saturday they made do with bread and water. Florence came to know them as sowers of peace within the web of interlocking vendettas that stained with blood the City of the Lily.
The sacrifices of the Mantellate were like a single oblation offered for the end of that age of hatred. Juliana, beside her companions, had something more to offer. For some time she had been suffering from a stomach ailment — piercing pains of the kind that wear down the strongest constitution. Little by little the girl with the mantle, now a woman who had guided her convent for decades, could no longer swallow even the small amount of food she needed to sustain herself.
So it was that 19 June 1341 became the hinge of an extraordinary story. That woman of God, on the point of death, was refused the possibility of receiving the Eucharist, for fear that she could not swallow the consecrated host. Juliana asked that it be laid upon her breast, as was the custom of the time with the gravely ill while the priest accompanied the gesture with prayer. But it is told that with Juliana something incredible came to pass. The host vanished. Juliana breathed her last, and as the nuns laid out her body they discovered, at the level of her heart, a violet mark the size of the host, as though it had been imprinted upon her.
To this day the Mantellate bear this mark upon their religious habit, in memory of their foundress’s last, miraculous Communion. Clement XII canonized her in 1737.