Celestina Bottego

From a Montana Mining Town to the Missions

Celestina Bottego was born in Glendale, Ohio, on December 20, 1895, to an Italian immigrant father and an Irish-American mother, and grew up in the copper-mining town of Butte, Montana, where she excelled academically, topping Montana’s state eighth-grade examinations in 1910. That same year, at fourteen, she moved with her mother to Parma, Italy, the home of her father’s family and of her famous uncle, the African explorer Vittorio Bottego. Bilingual and bicultural, she became a teacher and catechist in Parma.

From 1938 she taught English to seminarians of the Xaverian Missionaries in Parma. Their superior, Father Giacomo Spagnolo, discerned in this laywoman in her late forties the foundress of a female missionary branch. She initially declined, but after prayer accepted, and in 1945 the Xaverian Missionary Sisters of Mary were born in Parma, notable for a flexible, modern style, including permission for sisters to serve without a traditional habit.

As mother general she guided the congregation’s growth into overseas missions, attended the opening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962, and resigned in 1966 to hand the institute to a new generation.

She died in Parma on August 20, 1980. Her cause opened in the Diocese of Parma in 1994, the diocesan inquiry of 1995 to 1997 was ratified in 1998, and on October 31, 2013, Pope Francis declared her Venerable, one of a small number of US-born Venerables.

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