MARIA CROCIFISSA di Gesù. — First superior of the Passionists, born Faustina Costantini on 18 August 1713 in Corneto (now Tarquinia), died there on 15 November 1787. At the age of twenty she entered the Benedictine monastery of St Lucy in Tarquinia. In 1771, by order of Clement XIV, she transferred to the monastery of the Passionists, founded in the same city by St Paul of the Cross, as its first superior.
She was a religious of outstanding virtue, distinguished by her devotion to the Crucified Jesus and by the most severe penances, undertaken with the spirit of an expiatory victim for the sins of mankind. She received high mystical gifts. From 1738 she was under