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.
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.
