Saint Maria Elisabeth Hesselblad

Saint Maria Elisabeth Hesselblad was a Swedish religious sister who restored the Order of Saint Bridget in Rome and devoted her life to the cause of Christian unity. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her on April 24, the day of her death; in local calendars her memorial is kept on June 4, her birthday.

She was born on June 4, 1870, in the village of Fåglavik in Sweden, the fifth of thirteen children. A month later she was baptized in her parish of Hudene, in the Lutheran Church of Sweden. Already at school, seeing that her classmates belonged to different churches, Elisabeth began to ask where the one fold of Christ was. In 1888, at the age of eighteen, she emigrated to America to support her family.

In New York she trained at the nursing school of Roosevelt Hospital and also cared for the sick in their homes. Her guide became the Jesuit Johann Georg Hagen, who introduced her to the teaching of the Church. On August 15, 1902, the Solemnity of the Assumption, at the Visitation convent in Washington, she received conditional baptism from him and became a Catholic.

Soon afterward she came to Rome, where she was confirmed and visited the house in which Saint Bridget had lived and died. Gravely ill, she wished to die there. On March 25, 1904, she settled in that house with the Carmelite nuns who occupied it at the time. In 1906, with special permission from Pope Pius X, she took the Bridgettine habit and made her religious vows. On September 9, 1911, she received three young postulants from England and began a new branch of the Order of the Most Holy Savior of Saint Bridget.

In 1923 Mother Elisabeth brought the Bridgettine sisters back to Sweden, to Djursholm near Stockholm, and in 1935 also to Vadstena, the town associated with Saint Bridget. In 1931 the Holy See gave her the church and house of Saint Bridget in Rome for permanent use, and they became the heart of the order. Houses were also founded in Switzerland, England, and India. She taught the sisters that prayer for Christian unity was the first aim of their vocation. She herself worked zealously for rapprochement between Lutherans and the Catholic Church.

During the Second World War her house on Piazza Farnese became a place where the sisters handed out food and clothing to those in need. From December 1943 until the liberation of Rome in June 1944, Mother Elisabeth hid twelve members of the Jewish Piperno and Sed families there. The survivors recalled that she respected their faith and did not try to convert them. In 2004 Yad Vashem recognized her as Righteous Among the Nations. She died in the house of Saint Bridget in Rome on April 24, 1957.

John Paul II beatified her on April 9, 2000, and called her a pioneer of ecumenism. The miracle recognized for her canonization was the healing of a two-year-old boy in Cuba. Pope Francis canonized her on June 5, 2016, in Saint Peter’s Square, together with the Polish priest Stanislaus Papczyński.