On the occasion of the liturgical feast of Blessed Enrichetta Alfieri 2025 – after learning about her parents and her life in the novitiate in Vercelli – this year we turn to a precious notebook, entitled Componimenti (Compositions), in which Alfieri Enrichetta Maria, a student at the Magistrali Schools, collected 22 essays she wrote during her years of study for her primary school teaching diploma at the Regia Scuola Femminile Rosa Stampa in Vercelli.
Those youthful essays already contain her whole life: they allow us to know her heart as a young woman, as a young nun – on 10 September 197 she had taken her first temporary vows – and to understand her attention to the contemporary world in which she lived and which she wanted to serve and love.
In the storm of the First World War, her vocation as an educator
Sister Enrichetta felt she was an educator and prepared herself to be one. Thus, every statement she made revealed her desire, what she knew to be her vocation, because in her studies, to which she had been assigned by her superiors, Enrichetta knew she was obeying God and already beginning to live her charism as an educator, her service as a Sister of Charity.
This can be clearly seen in the topics most relevant to the field of education, those in which she was invited to discuss the education of children, the method to be used with them, the values she would communicate to them, and the model of teacher she would have liked to be and should have become.
Although Sister Enrichetta was a teacher for only a few months, she was an educator for her entire life.
Title: An education that is not educational is worse than ignorance
By Sister Enrichetta
“Give a man all the education you want, let him be a highly skilled doctor, an eloquent speaker, a shrewd politician, an incomparable writer, but if he does not have a deep moral sense, a generous and holy love for humanity, if he does not know his duty, what good are all his finest gifts? Who will keep him among the unhappy people afflicted by epidemics? Who will make him speak out in favour of the weak against the arrogant oppressor? Who will make him renounce the many gains of the corrupt and corrupting press, to better spend his time giving advice and guiding the population to goodness and the fulfilment of duty?
All this leads us to conclude that highly developed intelligence and dead and wasted moral faculties will be in the power of an evil man, an instrument of wickedness, arrogance and oppression. Nor can we foresee to what extent human malice, enlightened by knowledge, can push refinement.
Sister Enrichetta was referring to the painful events of the First World War. For this reason, in her conclusion, she expressed a clear assessment of the “useless slaughter” that was taking place.
‘What more persuasive proof is there than the bloody war currently being fought with such ferocity in our poor Europe? If education were not so developed, or rather, if it were coupled with upbringing, how much less blood would be shed, how much lower would the number of victims be? Instead, they use all the new inventions to increase pain and mourning.’
The firm convictions of “Miss Alfieri”
Those were the years of the struggle for the separation of Church and State and the promotion of civil and secular values. Miss Alfieri was punished in 1913 with a note of reprimand on her school report card for not attending school on 8 December, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception: ‘The Board of Teachers did not consider the pupil’s absence on 8 December to be justified and therefore decided to give her a mark of 8 for conduct in the subjects taught on that day.’
In her ninth essay, she found herself commenting on this sentence. And she did so with the passionate tone of someone who is convinced of what she writes
Title: Life is not a banquet, but a struggle
Developed by Sister Enrichetta
‘No, life is not just any pastime, as we imagine it in childhood, nor is it a banquet for a rational, intelligent and active being such as man, but rather a continuous struggle that requires willpower, patience and, above all, perseverance.’
These reflections were written by a nun, a young woman who had recently consecrated herself to the Lord with all the enthusiasm of her young years, and had done so at one of the most tragic moments in Italian and European history. In her essay, this young woman presented the virtues that she believed were necessary to have the courage to give oneself to God and to one’s brothers and sisters: ‘Will, courage, patience and, above all, perseverance’.
And “struggle”. Sister Enrichetta emphasised this several times in her essay: life was a struggle and no one could avoid it, because fatigue, commitment, and the struggle against what hinders the fulfilment of the human being belong to the very history of man and mark its progress.
‘From the humblest labourer to the greatest philosopher; from the roughest worker to the most skilled artist; from the simplest doctor to the most expert professor, everyone struggles.’
On the other hand, only tenacious fidelity to ideals, only the commitment to putting oneself on the line, allow one to aspire to great things and happiness.
Source: Vedere con il cuore (Seeing with the Heart), Ennio Apeciti, Centro Ambrosiano 2006
