Blessed Małgorzata Łucja Szewczyk

Blessed Małgorzata Łucja Szewczyk was a Polish religious, the foundress of the Congregation of the Daughters of Our Lady of Sorrows, known as the Seraphic Sisters. She served the poor, the sick, and the old, first as a Franciscan tertiary and then together with her sisters. Her memorial falls on June 5.

She was born in 1828 at Szepetówka in Volhynia, in lands then belonging to Russia. She lost her parents in childhood and was brought up by her sister. From her youth she felt called to religious life, but the tsarist authorities were then suppressing monasteries. In 1848 she therefore joined the Third Order of Saint Francis and took private vows, while helping the poor in secret.

From 1870 to 1873 she stayed in the Holy Land, where she served poor and sick pilgrims in the hospital of Saint Joseph in Jerusalem. There she resolved to give her whole life to God and to the poorest. Afterward she helped people in need in Warsaw. In 1877 at Zakroczym she met the Capuchin Blessed Honorat Koźmiński, who became her spiritual director. Into his hands she made her religious profession with a vow of mercy and took the name Maria Małgorzata.

From 1880 she took poor and sick old women into a rented apartment at Zakroczym, taking care not to arouse the suspicion of the Russian authorities. Her first companions soon joined her. On April 8, 1881, with the help of Blessed Honorat, she secretly began a congregation first called the Sisters of the Poor and became its superior. Its motto became the words “All for Jesus through the Sorrowful Heart of Mary.”

After ten years she moved to Galicia, where Austrian rule allowed greater religious freedom. In 1891 she founded a house at Hałcnów, where on August 14 the sisters received the habit from Cardinal Albin Dunajewski and the congregation took the name Daughters of Our Lady of Sorrows. In Oświęcim she built a convent with the church of Our Lady of Sorrows, which became the motherhouse. The sisters ran orphanages and elementary schools and nursed the old and the sick. In the Russian partition, under persecution, the houses in Warsaw and Zakroczym were closed.

She drew strength from the Eucharist, from meditation on the Passion of Christ, and from devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows. In 1901 the first general chapter, despite her advanced age, elected her superior general again. In 1904, on the advice of Blessed Honorat, she resigned because of her health. She spent the last year of her life at Nieszawa, gradually losing her sight, and died there on June 5, 1905. Her relics rest in the convent church in Oświęcim.

Benedict XVI recognized her heroic virtues in 2011 and, in 2012, a miracle attributed to her intercession: the healing in 1975 of a Seraphic Sister gravely ill with a lung disease. The beatification, together with that of Zofia Czeska, took place on June 9, 2013, at Łagiewniki in Krakow; Cardinal Angelo Amato presided over it on behalf of Pope Francis.