Restituta Kafka took her religious name from a third century martyr beheaded under the Roman Emperor Aurelian, little guessing that the age of martyrdom had not passed. She was born in Vienna. At nineteen, she entered a nursing order, the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity, serving faithfully for many years in the district hospital in Modling, near Vienna, where she was put in charge of the operating room.
After the Anschluss in 1938, the Nazis forbade any religious symbols in hospitals. Sr. Restituta not only refused to comply with this order, but she defiantly installed crucifixes in every room in a new ward of the hospital.
After being denounced to the Gestapo by a hospital surgeon, a fanatical Nazi, Sr. Restituta was arrested on Ash Wednesday in 1942. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, wished to make a special example of her and personally ordered her execution. After a year in prison, on March 30, 1943, she was beheaded. Her body was thrown into a mass grave.
Sr. Restituta was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1998.
Thea Bowman was one of the great treasures of the American Catholic Church. Ablaze with the spirit of love, the memory of struggle, and a faith in God’s promises, she impressed her audiences not just with her message but also with nobility of her spirit.
Born Bertha Bowman in rural Mississippi, she was baptized as a Catholic at the age of ten, while attending parochial school. Later, she was inspired to enter the congregation that ran her school, the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, and took the name Sister Thea. She found herself the only African American in a white religious order. But she had no desire to blend in. She believed her identity as a black woman entailed a special vocation; she was committed to asserting a black way of being Catholic. Thus, she believed the Church must make room for the spiritual traditions of African Americans, including the memory of slavery, but also the spirit of hope and resistance reflected in their spirituals, the importance of family, community, celebration and remembrance.
“What does it mean to be black and Catholic?” she asked. “It means that I come to my church fully functioning. I bring myself, my black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become. I bring my whole history, my traditions, my experience, my culture, my African-American song and dance and gesture and movement and teaching and preaching and healing and responsibility as gift to the Church.”
She was a spellbinding speaker who preached the Gospel to audiences across the land, including the US bishops. In one speech, she noted that women were not allowed to preach in the Catholic Church. But this should not stop them from preaching everywhere else!
God has called to us to speak the word that is Christ, that is truth, that is salvation. And if we speak that word in love and faith, with patience and prayer and perseverance, it will take root. It does have power to save us. Call one another! Testify! Teach! Act on the Word! Witness!
After being diagnosed with incurable cancer she bore a different kind of witness. She continued to travel and speak, even from her wheelchair. The faith that sustained the slaves, the hope expressed in the spirituals, the love embodied by St. Francis, now sustained her in her personal way of the cross. And to her other gifts to the Church she added the witness of her courage and trust in God. “I don’t make sense of suffering. I try to make sense of life,” she said. “I try each day to see God’s will.”
She died on March 30, 1990, at the age of fifty-two. Her cause for canonization is in process.
Blessed Joan was born to a noble family in France. As a child, it was said that her prayers had saved a neighbor boy, Robert de Sille, after he fell into a pond and nearly drowned. When Joan turned sixteen, she and Robert were married. Although they elected to maintain a celibate relationship, they were apparently a devoted couple and together they adopted and raised three orphans. During an invasion by the English, Robert was taken captive and held for ransom. He managed to escape, and afterward he and Joan devoted themselves to the ransom of other prisoners.
This charity infuriated Robert’s family. Upon Robert’s death in 1362, they expelled Joan from their house. For several years she supported herself as best she could, eventually learning to prepare medicines and becoming a Franciscan tertiary. But for a while she was reduced to living in pigsties and dog kennels. When her in-laws eventually restored her property, she gave it all to the Carthusians, and at the age of fifty-seven retired to a small room in Tours, where she devoted herself to prayer and works of mercy. Though some considered her mad, many others recognized her evident holiness. She was known for her gift of prophecy and her special dedication to prisoners – whether criminals or captives of war. At one time, she even persuaded the king to release all the prisoners of Tours. She died on March 28, 1414, and was beatified in 1871.
Blessed Mark, who was born in Montegallo, Italy, studied medicine, married and worked as a doctor for some years. At a certain point, he and his wife both agreed that their true vocations were to religious life. So they parted, she to become a Poor Clare, while he entered the Franciscan community in Fabriano. After his talents as a preacher were discovered, he embarked on a preaching tour that essentially lasted forty years. In prayer one day he heard a voice that said, “Brother Mark, preach love!” This became his central theme – the love of God and one’s neighbor.
In his dedication to the poor, Mark sought to find a remedy for the terrible suffering cause by predatory loan sharks. He established what were called monti di pieta – essentially pawn shops that offered small loans in exchange for some modest collateral. Later these became banks that lent money at little or no interest. He easily raised the necessary funds through his preaching.
Eventually, age and the strenuousness of his itinerant ministry caught up with him. In Vincenza, where he lay dying on March 19, 1496, he asked to hear the Passion read aloud. Upon hearing the words, “It is consummated,” he breathed his last.
Maria Rita de Souza Pontes was born in Salvador, Brazil, to a well-to-do family. As a child, the sight of homeless beggars in her neighborhood inspired her to devote her life to the poor. At eighteen, she joined the Congregation of Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, a Franciscan community founded in Brazil in 1910. She took the religious name Dulce after her mother, who had died when Maria was just three years old.
Within a year of entering religious life, she had formed the Workers Union of St. Francis, the first Christian workers’ movement in Brazil. Meanwhile she took to sheltering homeless sick people in abandoned houses, begging for food and medicine. As their numbers steadily increased, Dulce asked permission from her superior to house them in chicken sheds on the convent grounds. Eventually this gave rise to St. Anthony’s Hospital, a complex of medical, educational, and social services. She could never pass a person in need without seeing the face of Christ:
“We may be the last door, and for this reason we cannot close.”
Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, Sister Dulce became one of the most beloved figures in Brazil. She died on March 13, 1992, and was beatified in 2011.
