“I am nothing. God is everything.”
These words, written quietly in Mother Thecla Merlo’s notebook, were not the confession of a woman who had done nothing—but of a woman who had learned where the weight of the world truly belongs.
Born on February 20,1894, Teresa Merlo never had robust health. In fact when she joined the young followers of Blessed James Alberione in Alba, Italy, the others were afraid that they would end up taking care of her because her health was so poor. Nevertheless, on July 22, 1922, she made her private perpetual religious profession and took the name “Thecla.” At that time, Fr. Alberione appointed her Superior General of the first small band of young women and thus the Pious Society of the Daughters of St. Paul came into being. For the rest of her life she would be the attentive, concerned, and compelling mother who cultivated the congregation as it took root around the world.
“Let the Good Lord Be Sought Always”
In her many responsibilities, she turned to her Father in heaven. She wrote, let us live our vocation “in love and in faith in the Heavenly Father…. Let him, the good Lord be sought always and everywhere.”
As she led her sisters through the darkness of two world wars, she encouraged them to confidence and love. “I await everything from God, filled with full trust: founded on the conviction that God is glorified not through fear but through trust and love.”
In her capacity as Superior General, Mother Thecla made many trips around the world visiting her sisters. These visits always warmed her heart. As she came to know people of many cultures who had never heard the preaching of the Gospel, she would encourage the sisters to feel associated to Jesus’ mission to save the world. She often spoke about the power of a heart full of God. Only such a heart could bring to the world in all its turmoil the one thing it needed: God!
“How beautiful and holy it is to communicate Jesus to souls, that Jesus whom we want to carry always in our hearts.”
Divine Indwelling
More and more, Mother Thecla opened her soul to the mystery of the divine indwelling. She began to taste his continuous presence in her soul. She listened to him speak. She became docile to the Spirit’s guidance. She turned to her Heavenly Father for comfort. She trusted in the power of grace to transform her into another Christ.
She wanted this also for her Sisters. “Let yourselves be drawn by the Lord,” she wrote the Sisters. “Let us love the Lord with simplicity and let us continue to walk towards Divine union so that our soul may not desire anything else but to rest in God.”
In the final twenty years of her life, her spiritual life became more simple: “Sanctity! I desire it. To live the Trinitarian life as Mary Most Holy did. To trust in the heavenly Father, to love the Son who came to save me, to confide in the grace of the Holy Spirit. The Heavenly Father is always near me, is within me, thinks of me and provides for everything. Jesus is with me, the Holy Spirit sanctifies me. …To think often that the Blessed Trinity is within me! Adoration, union, recollection and…staying in the company of such guests.”
In this intimate and familiar union with the Trinity, Mother Thecla’s entire being tended to get lost as a drop of water in an ocean. She wrote: “My God, that I may be hidden in you, get lost in you, as a drop of water in an ocean.”
It was fitting then, that Mother Thecla’s final gift to us, three years before her death, would be a simple one, and one that would orient us again and again to this focus of her life which she wanted her daughters also to have. She offered her life on the Feast of the Holy Trinity in 1961 using this prayer:
“With a humble and contrite heart I pray to you, Divine Persons of the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to accept the offering of my life for the entire Congregation of the Daughters of St. Paul so that all may become saints.”
In the month of February, we celebrate both Mother Thecla’s birth and the day she passed into eternity—a quiet arc that holds together beginning and fulfillment. In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, marked by unrest and fragility, her life reminds us where true peace is found. Amid turmoil that reveals our deep need for God’s mercy and abiding presence, Mother Thecla teaches us how to rest our hearts in trust in the Heavenly Father, to live with serenity even when the weight of the world feels heavy, and to remember—with freedom rather than fear—that we are nothing on our own, and that it is God who does all things in us, through us, and beyond us. She trusted for all her Sisters that God will use us in his plan of salvation by making us more and more like Christ and associating us to his mission of redemption.
All quotations from Mother Thecla’s Circular Letters and unedited notebooks.