Blessed Anna Maria Taigi: A mother and a mystic

When we think of great Catholic mystics, names like Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and Margaret Mary Alacoque come to mind, along with modern saints such as Faustina Kowalska and Pio Forgione. But all of those women and men consecrated their lives to God as priests or religious.

Like another great mystic, Catherine of Siena, Blessed Anna Maria Taigi (1769-1837) was born in the city of Siena, Italy. But unlike Saint Catherine, Anna Maria spent her life as a wife, mother, and grandmother, dealing with diapers and worrying about how to make ends meet.

When she was born, Anna Maria Giannetti’s father had his own business in Siena. But for some reason—whether through his own fault or because too many customers owed him money—his business went bankrupt. When Anna Maria was six years old, she and her parents moved to Rome to start over. Her father then became a domestic servant in a wealthy household, while her mother became a cleaning woman.

Both of her parents bitterly resented this downturn in their station in life, and her father often took out his frustrations on his family. Nevertheless, Anna Maria was a cheerful girl who uncomplainingly helped her mother with household chores. Because of their poverty, she was only able to attend a free school for girls for two years and learned to read but not to write.

When she was thirteen years old, she was sent to work at a dress shop operated by two elderly women. After five years, she and her parents began to work as servants in the household of a noble Italian family.

Anna Maria was a young, attractive teenager, as well as devout and virtuous. However, surrounded by wealth (though not her own) and encouraged by flattery about her appearance, she learned to flirt. And she began to think about marriage.

Every day, a young porter from another noble household brought food to her noble household. He was good-looking, upright, and a servant, just like her. A month after their first meeting, Domenico Taigi had asked her parents for her hand in marriage. Anna Maria, a practical woman, agreed. She was twenty years old, and he was twenty-eight.

Domenico was a faithful husband, father, and Catholic. But while his wife was sensitive, gentle, and intelligent, he could be stubborn, bad-tempered, and a bit dense. For example, he became very angry—though not abusive—if he was tired or if things were not done to his liking. Over the years, Anna Maria was able to tame his bad humor through humility and patience, although it is not clear he ever realized how subtly she was able to redirect his outbursts.

Proving that Domenico was a better husband than one might think, he uncomplainingly allowed his cantankerous mother-in-law to live with them in their tiny two-room apartment in the Chigi palace. Those rooms were quickly filled with four girls and three boys, although at least two of the children died young. Later, one of her daughters was widowed and moved back into their home with her children. A grown son also moved in, bringing his wife, who was initially very critical of Anna Maria. In other words, Anna Maria’s household was filled with all the ordinary conflicts and annoying personality differences found in every family.

At the beginning of their marriage, Domenico was so proud of his beautiful wife that his favorite entertainment involved strolling through the city streets and watching the street performers with Anna Maria on his arm. For her part, young Anna Maria enjoyed dressing in the finest clothing and jewelry that her husband could afford and being admired by others.

But she was dissatisfied.

Finally, something happened in twenty-one-year-old Anna Maria’s heart. Some biographers have claimed that she had an affair and repented. But Anna Maria always called herself a great sinner, not an adulteress. Whatever led her to make a radical change in her life, it was probably a realization that she was close to crossing a line into serious sin, not that she had actually crossed it.

It took time for her to find an understanding confessor and spiritual director to help her make changes in her life. Multiple priests aided her in this capacity over her lifetime. But prayer and the sacraments became the center of her interior life, not pretty clothing.

While Anna Maria made dramatic changes to her life after her conversion, she never lost sight of the fact that she was a wife and mother, not a nun. She undertook quiet penances, such as remaining standing while her family ate and denying herself the best part of the meal, along with other personal penances. She also led her family each morning in prayer, prayed the Rosary with them after dinner, and read to them about the saints. She discouraged idleness—there was always work to be done—and was actively concerned about immodest influences on her children.

She also became a Trinitarian tertiary with Domenico’s consent. However, when her spiritual director told her to wear the Trinitarian habit while she was pregnant—one wonders what the priest was thinking—Domenico put his foot down.

Anna Maria uncomplainingly accepted some penances that were simply part of being poor. The rooms in which they lived were located in a palace, but they were small and overshadowed by large buildings. The continual darkness in which she lived probably contributed to her later blindness. Due to political instability in Rome over the years and the family’s poverty, there were many times when she did not know where to obtain food for all the members of her household. But she trusted in God, and He always provided.

Anna Maria rose early and stayed up late to care for the needs of her family. She became known throughout Rome for her willingness to care for the sick and for her gift of healing, so people came to her home at all hours of the day or night to ask for help. When her father developed leprosy, she cared for him tenderly, despite the smell and his difficult personality.

For all these signs of holiness, Anna Maria Taigi could have easily been acclaimed a holy woman by the Church. But God also blessed this ordinary housewife with mystical gifts.

Since Domenico outlived his holy wife by seventeen years, he was asked to give testimony at her canonization process. The simple man related that, yes, sometimes his wife would stop talking in the middle of a sentence or while praying the rosary, but he always assumed she was simply thinking. According to other witnesses—her children, their household servants, and priests—it was clear that Anna Maria frequently went into spiritual ecstasies.

She also levitated. One of her daughters recalled watching her mother sweep the floor when she suddenly rose into the air. “Mamma, where are you going?” the girl asked. “Up there there is no dirt.”¹

To her spiritual directors, Anna Maria revealed that she received visions of our Lord and the Blessed Mother, who spoke to her and gave her direction. As she became known as a holy woman, friends, neighbors, and complete strangers approached her for spiritual advice. Priests and bishops, sometimes bearing questions from popes, came to her humble dwelling and asked for her wisdom in dealing with the issues of the day. All this traffic to her home caused tongues to wag, but Anna Maria treated even the worst gossips in her neighborhood with kindness.

But the most unusual aspect of her mystical life was her “sun”. By God’s grace, a globe of light appeared constantly before Anna Maria’s eyes, depicting events all over the world and becoming brighter and clearer as she grew in holiness. She saw the Holy Family in their home in Nazareth, terrifying calamities in her present day, and future events she could not understand (such as “black airships traversing the skies and covering the earth with fire and darkness”²). She saw friends in purgatory and acquaintances performing hidden acts of charity. She saw symbolic visions, which the Lord sometimes explained to her. Sometimes He did not. She also saw her own faults, which made her weep and perform even more penances.

These visions helped her console ordinary people as well as provide advice to popes. The priest who lived with her family for years carefully recorded her visions and testified to the accuracy of her predictions and insights. When people offered her money to thank her, she always refused. Instead of trading her spiritual insights for monetary gifts, she simply stayed up later to work and earn a little more money for her hungry family.

According to Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary,³ mysticism is:

The supernatural state of soul in which God is known in a way that no human effort or exertion could ever succeed in producing. … It is always the result of a special, totally unmerited grace of God.

Although many other saints have experienced visions and insights into past, present, and future events, no other visionary has reported this phenomenon of a mystical sun. It was as if God granted a unique grace to this particular woman in Rome for the good of the entire Church at a pivotal historical moment, simply because she was humble enough to handle such a powerful gift.

Anna Maria’s biographers sometimes compare her life to that of the famous Napoleon Bonaparte. Both were born in the same year. Yet one of them sought humility and holiness, leading many people to God, while the other sought pride and power, leading to the deaths of millions. Bonaparte’s mother, Letizia, who was a grasping woman, was rejected by polite society and almost every country after her son’s imprisonment and death. Only the pope welcomed her. She worshipped in the same parish as Anna Maria for almost two decades, and the holy housewife befriended the woman who had once been granted an imperial title. When Letizia died, forgotten and hated, Anna Maria prayed for her soul.

On the other hand, when Anna Maria died, the wife of a poor domestic servant, her body had to be publicly exposed for two days to allow for the many mourners who wanted to venerate her body. Soon, pilgrims began coming to her tomb. Miracles were reported due to her intercession. Eighteen years after her death, her body was found to be incorrupt.

A mystic, as the life of Blessed Anna Maria Taigi teaches us, is not always someone who spends her days in a cloister, studying theology texts and spending long hours in silence and solitude. Instead, a mystic can be a mom or a dad or anyone who loves God so much that she puts Him first in her life and loves the people around her with His Heart. That, after all, is the kind of mystic that God is calling every Catholic to become.

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