Saint Who?
Saints Who Taught about the Holy Spirit
Saint Elena Guerra
Foundress († 1914)Feast: April 11
Elena spent most of her life trying to build up the Church through the action of the Holy Spirit.
Born to wealthy Italian aristocrats, Elena had a strong devotion to the Holy Spirit, so strong that she wrote multiple letters to Pope Leo XIII begging him to rekindle devotion to the Holy Spirit among the faithful. Several years later, Pope Leo issued a papal encyclical on that topic and established a novena to the Holy Spirit for the universal Church, ending on Pentecost Sunday.
Elena founded an association of laywomen to educate girls, which later became the Oblate Sisters of the Holy Spirit. From her humble beginnings as a lay schoolteacher—teaching the young mystic Saint Gemma Galgani, for example—Elena saw her order spread all over the world. Elena also fought the spread of Freemasonry, a parallel religion to Christianity with its own rites and moral code, by trying to create a “militia of the Holy Spirit.” She wanted to unite the prayers and works of her sisters with those of other orders in spiritual combat against Freemasonry’s attacks on the Church. At the end of her life, sisters from her own order falsely accused Elena of mismanagement. In humility, she resigned from her own order to protect it from scandal.
Almighty God, may we all be
apostles of the Holy Spirit.
