Mother Maddalena’s family was friends with Father Angelo SecchS.J., who did much to lay the foundations for modern astronomy.  It is written of him:
After the capture of Rome by the Piedmontese in 1870, his firmness of faith and Secchi’s fidelity to the pope and the Jesuit Order were more than once put to a test. But no enticements, however alluring, of the new rulers … could induce him to falter in his loyalty or fidelity [to the pope].  The new [civil] authorities did not venture to expel him from his laboratory, and he continued his investigations until he succumbed to a fatal disorder of the stomach on February 26, 1878. The world had lost one its great pioneering scientists.
[There will be a chapter devoted to Father Secchi in Priests in the Life of Mother
 Maddalena.]