Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska

Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska, born Sophia Camilla, founded in Warsaw the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Felix of Cantalice, known as the Felician Sisters, to help abandoned children, the poor and the marginalized. She spent the last thirty years of her life in hiddenness, ill and almost deaf. The Church commemorates her on October 10.

She was born on May 16, 1825, in Kalisz, the eldest child of a well-to-do family; her father was a lawyer. At sixteen, by then living with her family in Warsaw, she fell ill with tuberculosis and spent a year recovering in Switzerland, where, as she later said, she learned to pray. She thought of entering the Visitation nuns, but on her confessor’s advice she stayed with her sick father. During a journey together, in the cathedral of Cologne, she understood that God wanted her for himself alone, though she did not yet know in what way.

In 1854 she joined a Warsaw charitable association of Saint Vincent de Paul. That same year, in two rented rooms, she took in a few homeless orphans and abandoned elderly women. Received into the Third Order of Saint Francis, she was given the name Angela. Her spiritual director until her death was the Capuchin Blessed Honorat Koźmiński. On November 21, 1855, together with her cousin Klotylda Ciechanowska, she gave herself to God under Mary’s protection before an image of Our Lady of Częstochowa. This day is regarded as the beginning of the congregation.

With the children she often prayed in the Capuchin church in Warsaw at the altar of Saint Felix of Cantalice, who is shown holding the Infant Jesus in his arms. From his name people began to call the sisters Felicians. On April 10, 1857, she and nine companions received the religious habit, and soon she became head of the community, which within a few years opened more than thirty houses. After the January Uprising the Russian authorities, suspecting the sisters of supporting the insurgents, dissolved the congregation in December 1864.

The congregation was reborn in Krakow, in the Austrian partition, where Mother Angela arrived in 1866. In 1868 she was elected superior general and made her perpetual vows, but only a year later, because of illness and growing deafness, she resigned from office. From then on she lived in hiddenness: she prayed, grew flowers in the convent garden and sewed liturgical vestments. She suffered from cancer. In 1874 the first Felician Sisters left for the United States to serve Polish immigrants.

She died in Krakow on October 10, 1899, shortly after the Holy See approved the constitutions of the congregation. Her relics rest in the church of the Felician motherhouse. John Paul II beatified her in Rome on April 18, 1993, on the same day as Faustina Kowalska. In his homily he recalled the words in which she summed up the program of her life: to love means to give, to give everything that love asks, at once, without regret and with joy.