Elisa Angela Meneguzzi was born on September 12, 1901, to poor and humble farming family in Padua, Italy. She manifested an ardently spiritual soul and spent hours in prayer, attended Mass every day and taught catechism.
In 1926, willing to totally donate her life to God, she joined the Sisters Congregation of Saint Francis de Sales, taking the name Liduina. She began to work there as a nurse in a girls' boarding school before being sent to Ethiopia as a missionary in 1937.
With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, she devotedly tended to the sick at a military hospital in Dire-Dawa.
The inhabitants of the city were for the most part muslim, and through the saintly testimony of Sr. Liduina, many were drawn to the Catholic faith. For this reason she was given the name, the "ecumenical flame."
She died of cancer on December 2, 1941 in the hospital of Dire-Dawa, Ethiopia where she spent her last years. Her body was returned to the motherhouse of her congregation in 1961, and she was beatified on October 20, 2002 by Pope John Paul II.
