Canossa collaborated with humanitarians such as Leopoldina Naudet and Antonio Rosmini in her mission of promoting the needs of the poor and setting a new method of religious life for both men and women.

[6] On 1 April 1808 she was given an abandoned convent where she took in two poor girls from the slum of the San Zeno neighborhood to care for them and to also provide them with an adequate education.

The pope noticed and did not wish to prolong the audience further so instructed Canossa to follow the usual protocol and send the Rule and other documents to Roman authorities for assessment.

She tried again some hours later and was again brought before Pius VII who gave her the same vague response; this hurt her because she thought the audience was too formal with a lack of concrete results.

Magdalene drew up a Rule for the congregation, and it received pontifical approval from Pope Leo XII on 23 December 1828 in the papal brief Si Nobis.

To this end she invited the priest Francesco Luzzi to open a small chapel adjacent to the sisters' convent of Santa Lucia in Venice.

[4] In 1833 the priest saw two laymen join him (Giuseppe Carsana and Benedetto Belloni) and who later took over the work of the place when Luzzi left to become a Carmelite friar.

[3] The death of Pius VII in 1823 halted work in the recognition of the congregation and she was upset that approval had not been granted since her meeting with the pope less than a decade before.

Canossa believed she would have better luck with his successor Pope Leo XII and in September 1828 left to go to Rome to request of him the formal approval needed.

Canossa died on 10 April 1835 after a period of deteriorating health; she had known in January that her time was coming to an end, and returned to Verona from Milan in March.

Pope John Paul II approved this miracle on 11 December 1987 and presided over Canossa's canonization in Saint Peter's Square on 2 October 1988.