Over the past several years, we have shared how the Visitation Monasteries in Europe in the 1800’s helped to house trafficked girls from the African continent, some who became student boarders and some, eventually, nuns. https://visitationspirit.org/2018/02/the-saint-bakhitas-of-visitation-monasteries/
This year we share the huge part the Milan Visitation Monastery played in this process, working closely with Servants of God Father Olivieri and Verri to support their efforts to save these young women. We will continue this series in several parts during this month of February.
The Visitation Monastery of Milan elaborated a multifaceted participation in the design of openness to the world which had a very important passage in the support given to the Pious work of the redemption of the Fathers Nicolò Olivieri and Biagio Verri. The close relationship that was created with this association is evidenced by a correspondence preserved in the archive of the monastery and particularly significant in view of the cause of beatification of FR. Verri which is still ongoing. The function performed by the Milanese Visitation within the missionary activities of the ransom of young women was mainly of an administrative and organizational nature. In fact, the monastery served as a collector of economic and material aid from a multiplicity of religious houses in northern Italy, but not only from there. The money that was concentrated in Milan came largely from lay donors, often anonymous, who considered it significant to support the huge expenses necessary for the redemption of girls or women bought on the African markets and subsequently transferred to Europe. The final destination of these people, who came from experiences of abuse and cruelty, was a religious house or a European monastery where they received a Christian education aimed at baptism and within which they often spent their whole life.
The favorable position in the heart of the city of Milan was certainly one of the aspects that favored this predilection by the missionaries, but it would not have been sufficient without the solid roots and the dense network of relationships that the Milanese Visitation had entwined and spread in the surrounding social fabric, widening them more and more. Even Fathers Olivieri and Verri probably realized the peculiarity offered by this network of ties and the reasons that had allowed their birth, then started a fruitful collaboration starting from the fifties of the nineteenth century until the end of the Opera Pia in the decade of 1880 . Although the content of the letters is mostly focused on the information necessary for the collection and dispatch of the money given, the frantic and tiring character that was the figure of the activities of the Pia redemption work emerges quite clearly. In several letters,Father Verri announced the stages of the subsequent journeys and those already concluded: these were exhausting journeys made throughout Europe or between this and the African continent in the search for funds and to accompany the womento the monasteries that welcomed them. The Visitation of Milan therefore assumed the important function of a center for collecting and sorting alms, becoming a fixed point in the wide and lively frame of the “verriana” missionary activity.
End of Part 1
Source: https://air.unimi.it/retrieve/handle/2434/354297/521390/phd_unimi_R09936.pdf
