Sister Blandina Segale, S.C.

The Fastest Nun in the West

Rosa Maria Segale was born on January 23, 1850, in Cicagna, a small town in the hills above Genoa, Italy. Her family emigrated to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1854. At sixteen, Rosa entered the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, taking the religious name Blandina. She could not have imagined where obedience would send her.

In 1872, Sister Blandina received her assignment: Trinidad, Colorado, a rough frontier town in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. She was 22 years old. Over the next two decades, she served across the territories of Colorado and New Mexico, founding schools in communities that had none, building hospitals with her own hands, and facing down frontier violence with extraordinary courage.

Her encounters with Billy the Kid became legendary. She personally persuaded the young outlaw to abandon a plan to kill four doctors in Trinidad. In Santa Fe, she walked into an armed mob intent on lynching a prisoner and stopped them. She founded industrial schools for Hispanic and Native American children in Albuquerque and advocated fiercely for communities that the territory’s power structure ignored.

In 1894, after more than 20 years on the frontier, Sister Blandina returned to Cincinnati. She turned her energy to the wave of Italian immigrants arriving in the city, co-founding the Santa Maria Institute in 1897, a settlement house that provided English classes, job training, and social services. She founded the first Catholic settlement house in Ohio.

Sister Blandina died on February 23, 1941, at age 91, after 75 years of religious life. Her cause for canonization was opened in 2014 by Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe. An 800-page positio was approved by nine Vatican historians. She is the first person in New Mexico’s 400-plus year Catholic history to be vetted for sainthood. If canonized, she would become the patron saint of immigrant children.

Timeline