Blessed Maria Restituta Kafka

Blessed Maria Restituta Kafka was a Franciscan sister and a surgical nurse at the hospital in Mödling near Vienna. She did not yield to National Socialism: in defiance of the authorities’ ban she hung crucifixes in the hospital, and in 1943 she was beheaded. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on March 30, the day of her death.

She was born on May 1, 1894, in Husovice, today a district of Brno in Moravia, and at baptism she was given the name Helena. She was one of the seven children of the shoemaker Anton Kafka and his wife Maria. When she was about two years old, the family moved to Vienna and settled in the Brigittenau district. In her youth she worked as a housemaid, and later as a nursing assistant at the Lainz hospital in Vienna.

At about the age of fifteen she resolved to become a religious sister “for the love of God and men.” At first her parents opposed it. In 1914 she was received in Vienna into the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity and was given the name Maria Restituta. She nursed the sick in the hospitals of Neunkirchen and Lainz, and in 1919 she was assigned to Mödling.

In Mödling she worked for more than twenty years as a surgical nurse and anesthetist. The doctors valued her skill, and the patients her tireless care. She was warm and at the same time determined, which is why many called her Sister Resoluta. After Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938, she did not accept the restrictions placed on the spiritual care of the sick. In defiance of the authorities’ ban she hung crucifixes with her own hands in the newly added part of the hospital and refused to take them down.

One of the doctors, a committed National Socialist, denounced her when she was dictating a poem directed against the regime so that it could be typed out. On Ash Wednesday, February 18, 1942, the Gestapo took her away straight from the operating room. On October 29, 1942, the People’s Court sentenced her to death for aiding the enemy and preparing high treason. The petitions for clemency, among them those of the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, were rejected. She spent thirteen months in prison and kept up the spirits of her fellow prisoners.

According to the apostolic letter of her beatification, before her death she recited aloud the formula of her vows, prayed for the conversion of the enemies of Christ, forgave her persecutors from her heart, and received Holy Communion. She also asked the prison chaplain to trace the sign of the cross on her forehead. Her last words have been handed down: “I have lived for Christ; I want to die for Christ.” On March 30, 1943, she was beheaded in the building of the regional court in Vienna.

Pope John Paul II beatified her on June 21, 1998, in Vienna, on the Heldenplatz. He then set her memorial for October 29, the day on which the sentence was passed, and the Church in Vienna keeps it on that day. In his homily the pope thanked Sister Restituta for having had the courage to swim against the tide of her times.