Annalena Tonelli–Servant of the Poor (1943–2003)

Annalena Tonelli studied to become a lawyer in her native Italy. But from an early age, she felt a deep calling to serve “the poor, the suffering, the abandoned, the unloved.” In 1969 she moved to northern Kenya to the town of Wajir. There, among a population of mostly ethnic Somalis, she taught school and later trained as a nurse. With support from the World Health Organization, she successfully developed a method for treating tuberculosis among nomadic peoples and also founded a school for the deaf. In 1984 the Kenyan army launched a war against a Somali clan in the Wajir region. Tonelli helped expose atrocities committed by the military. As a result, she was expelled from the country. She settled in Somalia, where she resumed her work with TB patients and later with those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Tonelli largely worked on her own. She embraced a “radical poverty” with no possessions apart from a change of clothes, “without a name, without the security of a religious order, without belonging to any organization.” She said she did it for Jesus Christ, who asks us to give our lives for our friends. In the end, she did give her life. After nineteen years in Somalia, she was assassinated by unknown gunmen on October 5, 2003. No motive was ever discovered.

“[Those] who count for nothing in the eyes of the world, but so much in the eyes of  God. . .have need of us, and we must be with them and for them, and it doesn’t matter at all if our action is like a drop of water in the ocean. Jesus Christ did not speak about results. He only spoke about loving each other, about washing each other’s feet, of forgiving each other always.”

—Annalena Tonelli

“No devotion to the saints is more acceptable to God,” Erasmus wrote, “than the imitation of their virtues. Do you want to honor St. Francis? Then give away your wealth to the poor, restrain your evil impulses, and see in everyone you meet the image of Christ.”

“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.” –Kurt Vonnegut

Lawrence Cunningham refers to secular saints–men or women of no evident faith or even professed nonbelievers who possess such integrity of life, such uncompulsive and tolerant clarity of vision, and such subordination of their own interests to the service of humanity that the only word that comes close to describing them is saint. While not Christian, they appear to others to be Christlike. As an example, he cites Dr. Rieux, the protagonist in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague.” I have known individuals who, while their lack of faith puzzled me, led lives of such goodness that, for lack of another word, they could only be described as holy.