BRENTI, ROSA TERESA. - Foundress of the Institute of the Most Holy Sacrament of Fognano (Ravenna), b. at Tredozio (Forlì) on 23 Feb. 1790, d. at Fognano on 7 Dec. 1872. A Dominican religious in the monastery of Tredozio until the Napoleonic suppression (1810), she moved to Borgo S. Sepolcro (Arezzo) as a pious teacher, where she prepared herself for her mission as an educator. In 1822, with the collaboration of Giacomo Ciani, archpriest of Fognano, and of Giuseppe M. Emiliani, a nobleman of Faenza, she began that work, which, having developed in the sumptuous monastery and in the adjoining "Emiliani" boarding school, soon became for the whole region a "colony propagating customs as strict as they were graceful" (L. Scarabelli).
Of adamantine temper, she faced difficulties, misunderstandings, and unspeakable calumnies with the resolve, translated into a vow, "to make amends by herself for all the evil that is committed in the universe." Favored with visions, ecstasies, and revelations, she set down in part, and out of obedience, the fruit of her mystical experiences in many notebooks, printed at Bologna in 1936, edited by Msgr. Giulio Cantagalli (2 vols.). As her Institute (of Dominican spirit) has as its end the offering of a "particular homage" to the Eucharist, so her spirit moves constantly in the atmosphere of "sacramental Love," providing us with a sample of eucharistic mysticism worthy of further study. The B. throws a particular light on the troubled nineteenth-century Romagna and on the figures who came near her and admired her, such as Emiliani, Card. Fesch, Card. Falconieri, Pius IX, who in 1857 visited the monastery of Fognano.