Blessed Hildegard Burjan

Blessed Hildegard Burjan was a wife and mother, a social activist, a member of the Austrian parliament and the foundress of the community of sisters of Caritas Socialis. She was born into a Jewish family and came to the Catholic Church as an adult. Her memorial falls on June 12, the day after the anniversary of her death.

She was born on January 30, 1883, in Görlitz in Silesia, the daughter of Abraham Adolf and Berta Freund. The family was wealthy but indifferent to religion. She went to school in Berlin and in Switzerland, studied in Zurich and in Berlin and earned a doctorate in philosophy. In 1907 she entered a civil marriage with Alexander Burjan, an engineer from Hungary.

The turning point was a grave kidney disease. On October 2, 1908, she was admitted to the Catholic Saint Hedwig’s Hospital in Berlin, run by the Borromean Sisters. For many months she underwent operations and the doctors lost hope, but at Easter 1909 she unexpectedly recovered. That same year she was baptized in Berlin and settled in Vienna with her husband.

There she was expecting a child. Fearing for her life, the doctors urged her to end the pregnancy, but she firmly refused, ready to die rather than take the life of her child. In 1910 she gave birth to her only daughter, Elisabeth. A few days earlier her husband had also been baptized.

Moved by the social teaching of the Church, she devoted herself to those most in need. In 1912 she founded an association of Christian home workers, women who earned their living working at home, and during the First World War she helped unemployed women and girls. In 1918 she established a religious association of women called Caritas Socialis, and on October 4, 1919, with the approval of the Church authorities, she gave rise to the community of sisters bearing that name. Their motto became the words of Saint Paul: “The love of Christ impels us.”

In 1918 she joined the Vienna city council, and in 1919 she entered the Constituent National Assembly as the first Christian Social woman deputy. She defended the rights of women, the family and Catholic schools. In 1920 she did not stand for election again, partly because of the antisemitism that was growing in her own party as well. Until the end of her life she led the sisters as superior general while remaining a married laywoman. She drew her strength from the Eucharist and from adoration. Benedict XVI recalled her words: “I know for certain that there is only one true happiness, and that is the love of God.” She died in Vienna on June 11, 1933, on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

In 2007 Benedict XVI recognized her heroic virtues, and in 2011 he approved a miracle attributed to her intercession: the healing of a woman who, according to the doctors, could no longer have children and who later became a mother. On January 29, 2012, in Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Cardinal Angelo Amato declared her blessed in the name of the pope.