Wilkes-Barre Mass to Celebrate 200Th Birthday of Pauline Von Mallinckrodt
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Wilkes-Barre Mass to celebrate 200th birthday of Pauline von Mallinckrodt
SCC Sisters celebrate life of ‘foundress’
By Mary Therese Biebel - [email protected]
Sister Ann Marie lights a candle at the dinner table in St. Nicholas Convent as Sister Anna, Sister Mary Theresa, Sister Maria Angeline, Sister
Elsa and Sister Ellen gather around.
Sister Maria Angeline Weiss, in the foreground, Sister
Mary Theresa Wojcicki and Sister Ellen Fischer pray vespers in the convent chapel.
A statue of Blessed Pauline von Mallinckrodt in a hallway at St. Nicholas Convent depicts the foundress of the Sisters of Christian Charity with a blind child. Blessed Pauline felt a special calling to provide for the needs of blind people, even during her youth in 1820s Germany.
Sister Ellen Fischer, who serves as principal of St. Jude School in Mountain Top, reads from her prayerbook.
What: Mass in honor of Blessed Pauline von Mallinckrodt’s 200th birthday
When: 10:30 a.m. Sunday, followed by reception
Where: St. Nicholas Church, 226 S. Washington St., Wilkes-Barre
WILKES-BARRE — Back in 1820s Germany, the story goes, a little girl named Pauline von Mallinckrodt was often late to school. It wasn’t because she was prone to dawdling or sleeping in, but because she stopped along the way to pick up pieces of broken glass so barefoot children wouldn’t cut their feet.
This compassionate little girl — born 200 years ago on June 3, 1817 into a well-to-do family — knew from an early age she wanted to become a religious Sister.
“It matured into a resolution so decided that I declined all proposals of marriage made to me,” she once wrote, explaining she was “determined to belong only to Jesus and to serve Him in His poor.”
As a young woman, Pauline tended children in a day nursery and learned Braille because she felt called to help the blind. She was known for carrying a basket filled with simple medical supplies as she walked through the streets so she would be prepared to help the sick.
In Paderborn, Germany, in 1849, she founded the Sisters of Christian Charity, a group of women who would dedicate their lives to education, nursing, social work and prayer. By 1871, more than 200 Sisters of Christian Charity were working in 32 establishments, including schools, orphanages and a home for the blind. But by 1873, according to a biography compiled by Sister Helene Schopper, the Sisters were no longer welcome in Germany. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, which translates to “struggle for culture,” restricted their work in education and later led to a state prohibition against religious congregations.
Pauline, whom Pope John Paul II would eventually declare “blessed,” or one step from sainthood, moved her Sisters to other countries, including the United States. Today, 400 of them serve in North and South America, the Philippines and in Germany and Italy.
When she was deciding where her Sisters should go, she paid an 1873 visit to St. Nicholas Church in Wilkes- Barre, where she agreed to the Rev. Peter Nagel’s request that she send Sisters to teach the parish children.
Today, six Sisters of Christian Charity live at St. Nicholas Convent. Along with other, visiting Sisters, they will celebrate the 200th birthday of Blessed Pauline during a 10:30 a.m. Mass on Sunday at St. Nicholas Church, followed by a reception.
They expect some of the people who attend will be individuals the Sisters of Christian Charity taught over the past several decades at local schools including St. Nicholas-St. Mary in Wilkes-Barre, St. Jude in Mountain Top, the former Sacred Heart School in Luzerne and the former St. Boniface School and former St. Ann’s Academy, both located in Wilkes-Barre.
For years St. Ann’s Academy, on South Meade Street in the Heights section of Wilkes-Barre, served as a “Motherhouse,” or headquarters for the order. Some of the young women who attended high school there were “aspirants,” which meant they were aspiring to become Sisters.
Why would that become a young woman’s goal?
“I saw how the Sisters were so happy all the time,” said Sister Ann Marie Kase, the eldest of 13 children, who told her father when she was 14 that she wanted to begin her preparations for joining the convent. At first he said she was too young. When she persisted he said, “Honey, I’ll never step in God’s way.”
During more than 40 years of teaching elementary students, Sister Ann Marie said, she made a point of telling them to concentrate on “J.O.Y. That stands for loving Jesus, loving others and loving yourself.”
“They (other Sisters) said I was a born teacher,” Sister Ann Marie said. What drew Sister Elsa Moore to becoming a Sister of Christian Charity, at age 17, was the nuns’ devotion to the Eucharist. Meditating before the Blessed Sacrament, which Catholics believe is the body of Christ “under the appearance of bread,” was “like a magnet,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave.”
On a typical week day, the Sisters of Christian Charity who live at St. Nicholas Convent go their separate ways — Sister Ellen Fischer and Sister Mary Theresa Wojcicki to St. Jude School; Sister Ann Marie to Holy Redeemer High School; Sister Anna Nguyen to her social work ministry; Sister Maria Angeline Weiss to Nativity Miguel School in Scranton; and Sister Elsa to visit the elderly.
They’re grateful when their schedules permit them to pray vespers, or evening prayer, together.
On a recent Thursday evening, they sang together and prayed aloud for “co-workers … relatives, friends and benefactors … all who have recommended themselves to our prayers … all travelers … all who are in danger of any kind.”
The list seemed to cover everyone in the world. Then they sat down to eat supper together. Like sisters.
Reach Mary Therese Biebel at 570-991-6109 or on Twitter @BiebelMT.