When she was 56, Angela Merici said “No” to the Pope. She was aware that Clement VII was offering her a great honour and a great opportunity to serve when he asked her to take charge of a religious order of nursing sisters. But Angela knew that nursing was not what God had called her to do with her life.

All around her hometown she saw poor girls with no education and no hope. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century that Angela lived in, education for women was for the rich or for nuns. Angela herself had learned everything on her own. Her parents had died when she was ten and she had gone to live with an uncle. She was deeply disturbed when her sister died without receiving the sacraments. A vision reassured her that her sister was safe in God’s care and also prompted her to dedicate her life to God. When her uncle died, she returned to her hometown and began to notice how little education the girls had. But who would teach them? Times were much different then. Women weren’t allowed to be teachers and unmarried women were not supposed to go out by themselves, even to serve others. Nuns were the best educated women but they weren’t allowed to leave their cloisters. There were no teaching orders of sisters like we have today.

So Angela invented a new way. She brought together a group of unmarried women, fellow Franciscan tertiaries and other friends, who went out into the streets to gather up the girls they saw and teach them. These women had little money and no power, but were bound together by their dedication to education and commitment to Christ. Living in their own homes, they met for prayer and classes. They were so successful in their service that Angela was asked to bring her innovative approach to education to other cities, and impressed many people, including the pope. Though she turned him down, perhaps the pope’s request gave her the inspiration or the push to make her little group more formal. Although it was never a religious order in her lifetime, Angela’s Company of Saint Ursula, or the Ursulines, was the first group of women religious to work outside the cloister and the first teaching order of women.