She accepted with enthusiasm every offer that she could respond to. Schools, boarding schools, orphanages, catechism, Work of St. Dorothy, the Spiritual Exercises… these were the practical ways in which she tried to give some support, and if necessary substitute the educative and formative role of the family.
They were years of intense work that she accomplished unobtrusively, on “tip toe”. They were also years of consolation. Naturally an apostle’s greatest joy is to announce Jesus and His Gospel. She traveled the streets of Rome, of the Pontifical State of Liguria and later of Portugal to enliven and to encourage the Sisters and proclaim the love Christ has for us.
They were also years of war, suffering, sorrow, death…
In the upheaval of 1849 the sisters of Genoa were dispersed, certain houses in the Pontifical State were closed, those of Rome were threatened as was also Paula’s life…
Certain fanatics declared they would throw her into the Tiber… and as was her style, she wittily answered that she would never have dreamed that her last mouthful of water would have been so dirty!!!…
Paula lived and interpreted events in the light of Faith.
Torn between the contradictions of the Italian revival, she suffered to see Pope Pius IX attacked on all sides, but she did not refuse to help Garibaldi when the Gianicolo was a battlefield… Every person is a child of God!
In 1866 the world opens its doors to Paula’s apostolic zeal. With missionary courage she accepts the risk to send sisters to Brazil. So many offer, it seems like a competition in generosity.
These distant countries need workers… “the harvest is great… but the laborers are few”.
Paula is quick to respond, but experiences all the anxiety of a mother who sees her children leave for a distant land…
She would like to leave with them… but as she later told them in a letter, she entrusted them to God who would carry them “in His all powerful arms”.
With similar courage, in the same year, she sends sisters to Portugal where, for political reasons all religious congregations had been suppressed.
The Sisters went there in secular clothes and worked undercover. Difficulties do not make Paula give up. All her life is interwoven with difficulties, but love always prevails: love for her God and for all men and women. She wrote, “For love of our Love nothing is too much”. (Letter 11.6)
The time arrives for Paula to enter into the new heaven and new earth that she had spent a lifetime constructing, while she caught a glimpse of it here on earth…
On June 11 , 1882…
Paula had reached the end of her stay on this earth but the gift she had received continues to develop through the dynamism of the Spirit which had created it, given it life and which still today sustains it and gives it life.