Lurana White was raised in New York in a wealthy family of high church Episcopalians. While attending a boarding school run by an order of Episcopal sisters, she felt a strong attraction to religious life. With her family’s permission, she entered the order as a postulant. She was pained, however, that her Episcopal order did not take a corporate vow of poverty. At this time, she heard about an Episcopal priest, Paul Watson, who was promoting reunion between the Anglican communion and Rome. Eventually they met and vowed to found a new Episcopal order in the spirit of St. Francis: the Society of the Atonement. Watson understood atonement both in the sense of redemption as well as at-one-ment – the cause of Christian unity. As founder of the Franciscan Sisters of the Atonement, White became Mother Lurana. She and Watson established a new home on a site named Graymoor in Garrison, New York.
Fr. Watson’s enthusiasm for Rome faced increasing opposition within the Episcopal Church. Eventually, in 1909, he and Mother Lurana successfully petitioned the Vatican to accept their community into the Catholic Church.
The community grew rapidly. Graymoor became a center not only for retreats but also for hospitality to indigent people and the down-and-out. On one occasion, a priest came seeking the superiors of the sisters. Dubious when Mother Lurana introduced herself, he protested that surely she was too young. She replied, “That is one fault of mine which will be remedied in time.” She died on April 15, 1935.
Maria Assunta Pallotta was born to a working-class family in Italy. By the time she was eleven, she was helping to support her siblings. But all the while, she dreamed of a religious vocation. When she was in her late teens, with support from her parish priest, she entered the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, traveling to the motherhouse in Rome. There, and in subsequent assignments, she joyfully embraced all duties, no matter how menial. She was especially happy to be assigned to farm work, caring for chickens, goats and pigs. In a letter to her parents, she explained her sense of mission:
“I ask the Lord for the grace to make known to the world purity of intention – which consists in doing everything for the love of God, even the most ordinary actions.”
Eventually, she would travel to the far side of the earth. It was only a few years since several members of her order in China had faced martyrdom during the Boxer uprising. Maria was eager to replace them. In February 1904, soon after taking her final vows, she received the joyous confirmation of her new assignment. Almost immediately, she departed for China, arriving during a particularly extreme winter. Yet only a year later, she was stricken with typhus. She died on April 7, 1905.
In 1954, she became the first non-martyr missionary sister to be beatified.
Anna Hoss, the daughter of poor weavers, was born in a small town of Bavaria. While praying in the chapel of a local convent of Third Order Franciscans, she seemed to hear a voice from the crucifix saying. “This shall be your home. Unfortunately, the convent refused to accept her, for she lacked the required dowry. Nevertheless, when she was twenty-one, the Protestant mayor of the town, who had done favors for the convent, interceded with the nuns to accept her as a postulant. She took the name Mary Crescentia.
Her first year in the convent were filled with trials. The other nuns resented Mary, calling her beggar, assigning her the most menial tasks, and forcing her to sleep in a corner on the floor. She accepted these ordeals with humility. In time, under a new superior, her virtues were recognized. She was accepted as a full member of the community and was steadily entrusted with positions of increasing responsibility: portress, novice mistress, and eventually mother superior. Through her wisdom and prayer, she carried the community to new heights of devotion, and her reputation spread beyond the convent. After her death on April 5, 1744, her tomb became a popular pilgrimage site. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2001.
St. Benedict was the son of African slaves, owned by a rich family in Sicily. Set free as a child, Benedict attracted attention, even as a youth, for his patience and charity. Once, as he was being taunted on account of his color, a passing Franciscan noticed him and invited him to join his community of hermits. Benedict did this. Eventually, in light of his evident holiness, he was chosen to serve as a superior of the community.
In time, this informal group was directed by the pope to affiliate with a regular order. They joined the Order of Friars Minor. Benedict was accepted as a lay brother and put to work as a cook. Once again, however, his special gifts drew wonder and respect. Though he was illiterate, he had an extraordinary knowledge of Scripture and theology, and his gift for reading souls put him in great demand as a spiritual director. Eventually his fame became a form of penance, as the sick flocked to him for healing, and pilgrims of every station sought his counsel.
Benedict died in 1589 at the age of sixty-three. He was canonized in 1807. Apart from widespread veneration in Latin America, St. Benedict was claimed as a patron saint of African Americans.
The long-childless parents of this saint had prayed to St. Francis of Assisi for a son. When their prayers were answered, they named him Francis. No doubt their intentions exerted a powerful influence on his later vocation. At twelve, her spent a year in a Franciscan house, receiving there a basic education and acquiring a taste for asceticism. Eventually, when he was not yet fifteen, he took up the life of a hermit, living in a cave near his hometown of Paola.
In time, Francis attracted disciples, the foundation of a religious order he called the Minim Friars – a name reflecting the desire that they be counted the least in the household of God. Along with traditional religious vows, Francis added a fourth: that his followers abstain not only from meat but also from any animal products whatsoever. Beyond a spirit of penance, this strict diet also reflected the saint’s determination to extend the spirit on nonviolence to all God’s creatures. Among the miraculous legends associated with Francis are many involving the restoration of life to assorted animals, including a favorite trout, which a hapless cleric had caught and cooked.
In 1481, King Louis XI of France, facing death, begged Francis to come and heal him. Francis made a trip, traveling barefoot the whole way. Though he told the king that life and death were in God’s hands, he managed to reconcile the king to his fate and remained by his side until the end.
Francis died on Good Friday in 1507 at the age of ninety-one.
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.
