Pope Francis has written a preface to a new Italian biography of Venerable Armida Barelli (1882-1952).

Barelli, a Secular Franciscan, was a co-founder of the Secular Institute of the Missionaries of the Kingship of Christ. She will be beatified in Milan on April 30.

Barelli “is a woman who has made secularity an antidote to self-referentiality” and “a characteristic that allows us to walk together to meet people in the particular condition they live in,” Pope Francis wrote. Her life “marks a decisive step in the vision of the laity: no longer a condition of a minority, but the discovery of how that lay experience, within the people of God, is the way to live holiness.”