Franciscan Studies
Blessed Camilla Battista da Varano
will be canonized a Saint on October 17, 2010
“Embrace yourself to Christ and be sure you will enrich yourself. He who thinks often of God, God remains in him. To him who keeps God within himself, with grace nothing is lacking.” Blessed Camilla Battista of Camerino
Inside the city walls of Camerino stands a five-century-old Poor Clare monastery. It was built in the 15th century by the Duke of Camerino, the father of Blessed Camilla Battista. Blessed Camilla’s remains lie in the church today. It was recently announced that she will be declared a saint on October 17, 2010. The church was heavily damaged in a 1997 earthquake, but has recently been restored. There are currently five Poor Clare sisters in residence.
Camilla was born on April 9, 1458 as an illegitimate daughter of Giulio Cesare da Varano, the Duke of Camerino. She was raised by his wife, and both were especially fond of her. She grew up and was educated amidst the prestige and splendor of the Renaissance court. Camilla reports in her autobiography that when she was eight or ten years old, she heard a sermon by a Franciscan friar on Good Friday. The priest exhorted his hearers to shed one teardrop in memory of Christ's passion. The sermon made such an impression on Camilla that the memory of it never left her. When she was a little older, she vowed to God that every Friday she would shed a tear for love of the passion of Christ. This shedding of a teardrop initiated Battista's spiritual life.
After hearing the preaching of another friar, she decided to enter the Poor Clare monastery in nearby Urbino. Camilla’s father built a monastery for her in Camerino. So on January 4, 1484, Camilla returned to the city of her birthplace accompanied by eight other Poor Clare sisters from Urbino. In this new monastic setting, under the strict rule of St. Clare, Camilla spent most of the remaining forty years of her life. She was, however, forced to flee Camerino and take refuge in the Abruzzo region under the Kingdom of Naples, during an outbreak of violence when the notorious Alexander VI, a Borgia Pope, excommunicated her father, who was accused, among other things, of hosting enemies of the pope and assassinating his own cousin (never proved). The real motive, it seems, was to annex Camerino into the Papal States. When Camerino did fall into the hands of the papal forces, Camilla’s father and three of her four brothers died violently. Camilla returned to Camerino in 1503 after the end of the Borgia family rule with the election of a new Pope. However, nothing of these events appears in her writings, and, on the contrary, Clare to maintain a spirit of forgiveness and obedience to the Papal Office.
Camilla died in her monastery in Camerino on March 31, 1524 at sixty four years old during a plague. Her cult as blessed was confirmed in 1843. Battista's spiritual life, begun with a ritual shedding of a single tear, had welled into the "high seas" of "the most secret thalamus of the myrrh-soaked heart of Jesus, the true and most bitter and envenomed sea, unnavigable for any angel or human intellect, and . . . one without bottom or end". Finally, as she puts it in the conclusion of the Vita spirituale, she no longer wished "to acknowledge Easter or Christmas or any other feast of the Church," but rather desired that "all the days of [her] life would be a Good Friday," in which "ever to weep the most bitter Passion of Christ so that at [her] death he may appear to [her] in his risen glory."