Daughter of Prince Giulio Cesare da Varano, lord of Camerino (Marche-Italy), Camilla was born on April 9, 1458. Much information about her life is known thanks to her autobiography “Vita spirituale”, collected in a letter which she wrote to Fr. Domenico da Leonissa, who involuntarily had encouraged her vocation.
In fact, as she herself wrote, when she was still a child (in 1466 or 1468), she heard on Good Friday the friar’s sermon on the Passion of Jesus: Camilla was much stricken by his words, so much so that shortly afterwards she vowed to shed a tear every Friday on the Passion of Christ, according to the preacher’s exhortation.
Although she was a girl who did not despise court entertainment and the frivolous life, that tear little by little produced prayer, meditation, fasting and a commitment to honoring her vow.
Despite some internal conflict overcome with assiduous prayer, she developed, at the age of 21 years, the desire to offer her life to Christ, but her father vehemently opposed it. In that time of struggle, there were many mystical experiences that the Lord made her experience and, in the end, on November 4, 1481, she was able to enter the monastery of the Poor Sisters of St. Clare at Urbino, taking the name of Battista. During the novitiate she wrote down the words she heard from Christ until them, rewriting them in 1491: it is the work entitled, “The Memories of Jesus”.
By order of her superiors, she left Urbino with eight sisters for the new monastery of Camerino which she wanted to establish on the Rule of St. Clare and where she entered on January 4, 1484.
During the year she spent at the monastery in Urbino, the Lord had revealed to her the suffering felt in his heart during the passion, which became the main thrust of her meditation. Shortly before August 1488 she had a persistent inspiration to put those revelations on paper: “The mental anguish of Jesus in his Passion” is her best-known work. For Sister Battista, the heart of Jesus, divine person, had an infinite move, but his interior pains (mental) were also infinite, which reached their peak at Gethsemane.
She also felt these pains: from October 1488 to 1494 she lived the “silence of God”, a mystical experience of the presence-absence of the Lord, which for her was total, similar to the abandonment that Jesus himself had felt during his passion.
But the suffering did not stop: following the unrest in central Italy caused by the expansionist aims of Cesare Borgia, Sister Battista was forced to move to nearby Fermo, but she was not welcomed. She continued for the Kingdom of Naples, but in the meantime her family was imprisoned and killed. When the surviving sister managed to restore the lordship in Camerino, she was elected abbess several times.
Around 1505 – 1506 Pope Julius II invited her to establish the monastery of Poor Clares in Fermo. In 1521, after the schism of Luther from the Roman Church, Sister Battista wrote “The Purity of the Heart”, in which she criticized the “indiscreet” behaviors of the clergy at the time, hoping for a “renewal” within the Church.
Camilla Battista died on May 31, 1524, during a plague epidemic.
Pope Gregory XVI recognized her cult and the title of Blessed on April 7, 1843, Pope Benedict XVI inscribed her in the canon of saints on October 17, 2010.
