Mother Maddalena often sent greetings to her spiritual director, Father Bernardine of Portogruaro, for his feast day. He was named after the great St. Bernardine of Siena. Father Kleber wrote of Father Bernardine:
“Father Bernardine as a saintly man and as a prudent spiritual director, his letters alone to our Servant of God would mark him as a man of the highest spiritual type.
“Such a superior, though having regard for every form of religious life that in some way or other was actuated by the spirit of Saint Francis, might be expected to favor and foster especially that form which most completely represented this spirit. Hence, in so far as the daughters of St. Clare were concerned, he was intent upon fostering a return to the primitive observance of the First Rule of Saint Clare.”…… - Father Albert Kleber
Mother Maddalena wrote in The Princess of Poverty about Saint Bernardine, to whom she was greatly devoted:
The great Reform of the Friars Minor in Italy, in the fourteenth century, brought about chiefly by S. Bernardine of Siena and his disciples, naturally extended itself to the Order of Poor Clares. A vast number of Monasteries of the Urbanist Branch adopted the First Rule of S. Clare and placed themselves under the direction of the Friars Minor of the Observance. A great many new Monasteries of the Reform were also established. This was a resplendent period of revival of the Franciscan Spirit and added a number of Saints and Blessed to the Franciscan Institutes. The Second Order counts six illustrious Virgins who lived at that particular time and whose public veneration has already been decreed by the Church.