Maria Lorenza Requenses in Longo
The Vatican record
- 9 October 2017 — Heroic virtue declared — title Venerable (decree list, 2017)
- 27 October 2020 — Miracle through their intercession approved (decree list, 2020)
Who they were
Maria Lorenza Requenses was born in 1463 at Lleida, in Catalonia, into a noble family. Suffering from rheumatoid arthritis since childhood, she was left with paralysed hands and feet after a servant tried to poison her. In 1506 she followed her husband, appointed regent of the Kingdom of Naples, and three years later was widowed with three children.
In 1516, on pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, she was healed, and vowed to spend her life caring for the sick: she founded the Hospital of the Incurables in Naples. Guided by St Cajetan, she later founded a monastery of Capuchin Poor Clares, with the approval of Paul III in 1535, and died in Naples on 21 December 1539.
The miracles
Sister Maria Cherubina Pirro — Naples, Italy — September 1881
A Poor Clare of the monastery Maria Lorenza had founded was dying of chronic tuberculosis of the lungs that had spread beyond them. From 31 August to 8 September 1881 the abbess had the community pray a novena to Our Lady and to their foundress, and on 9 September the relic of the foundress, her skull, kept in the monastery, was placed on the sister. She was healed.
Why that counted as sanctity
The case of Sister Maria Cherubina Pirro was examined by the Church's doctors and theologians and approved as a miracle on 27 October 2020, opening the way to beatification.
- Dicastery for the Causes of Saints - biography of Blessed Maria Lorenza Longo, with the miracle
- Dicastery for the Causes of Saints — promulgated decrees (causesanti.va), summarised in our own words
- Not yet in Wikidata. Name as the Vatican spells it.
Checked against the sources listed on 21 September 2026. Corrections welcome.