Blessed Franciszka Siedliska

Blessed Franciszka Siedliska, in religion Mary of Jesus the Good Shepherd, founded the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth. The congregation came into being in Rome, serves families, and in several countries took Polish emigrants into its care. The Church commemorates her on November 21, the day of her death.

She was born on November 12, 1842, at Roszkowa Wola in Mazovia, the first child of Adolf Siedliski and Cecylia, née Morawska, in a wealthy landowning family. She received a careful education at home, yet, as she herself wrote, God was not Lord in that house. She was prepared for her First Holy Communion by a Capuchin, Father Leander Lendzian, for many years her confessor and spiritual director. She received it on May 1, 1855, in Warsaw, and from then on she wished to belong to Christ alone.

Her father opposed her vocation and wanted to give her in marriage. Franciszka had been in poor health since childhood, so in 1860 her parents took her abroad for treatment. She spent several years at health resorts in Tyrol, Switzerland, Germany, and France, and in 1864, in Cannes, she made a private vow of chastity. After returning home she lived at the family estate of Żdżary and, together with her mother, became a Franciscan tertiary. Her father died in 1870.

In 1873 Father Lendzian concluded that God was calling her to found a new religious family. Franciszka made private vows, and on October 1 of that year Pope Pius IX blessed her plan. In the Russian partition of Poland a convent could not be established openly, so she left her country and in 1875 founded the first community in Rome. The sisters keep the anniversary of that event on the First Sunday of Advent. Their model was to be the hidden life of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in Nazareth. She made her religious profession with her first companions on May 1, 1884.

In 1881 she opened a house in Krakow. In 1885, at the request of priests working among Polish emigrants, she herself traveled with a group of sisters to Chicago. Later came houses in Paris and, in 1895, in London. The sisters taught catechism, ran schools, orphanages, and hospitals, and cared for the sick and the abandoned. Toward the end of her life the congregation numbered several hundred sisters in more than twenty houses in Italy, Poland, France, England, and the United States.

Soon after her sixtieth birthday she fell ill, and on November 21, 1902, she died in Rome. As a spiritual testament she left her sisters a threefold appeal: “Love, love, love.” She rests in the chapel of the congregation’s generalate in Rome.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on April 23, 1989, in Saint Peter’s Square. He called her a daughter of Mazovia and an apostle of the family, who saw in the rebirth of the family the condition for the rebirth of the nation. To her congregation belonged the eleven sisters shot by the Germans at Nowogródek in 1943, whom the same pope beatified in 2000.