Saint Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan

Saint Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan was a religious sister from Kerala in southern India and a daughter of the Syro-Malabar Church. She visited the homes of the poor, the sick and the dying regardless of their caste or religion, and in 1914 she founded the Congregation of the Holy Family, devoted to the service of families. The Church commemorates her on June 8.

She was born on April 26, 1876, in Puthenchira, Kerala, the third of the five children of Thoma and Thanda Chiramel Mankidiyan. At baptism she received the name Thresia. Her mother taught her the faith; she died in 1888, when the girl was twelve. At the age of ten she consecrated her virginity to Christ. She longed to live as a hermit, but her family opposed it, and she could not enter any of the existing congregations because her family was poor.

Even before founding the congregation she went out to people who had been abandoned. She nursed the sick, including those with leprosy and smallpox, whom their relatives often left without help, and after their death she cared for the orphaned children. Against the customs of the time she visited families in need on her own, for which even some members of the clergy criticized her. Her model for families, which she wanted to renew as domestic churches, was the Holy Family of Nazareth.

She received many mystical gifts, such as visions, ecstasies and the stigmata, and at the same time she went through severe temptations and spiritual torments. From 1902 until her death her spiritual director was Father Joseph Vithayathil, parish priest of Puthenchira. John Menachery, then bishop of Trichur, sent her to the Carmelite Tertiaries at Ollur, but it soon became clear that this was not her path. With Father Vithayathil’s help a hermitage was built in 1913 for her and her companions, and on May 14, 1914, the bishop erected the Congregation of the Holy Family. That day she was the first to make her vows, took the name Mariam Thresia, which expressed her devotion to the Mother of God, and became the first superior.

Mother Mariam Thresia led the young congregation with motherly care, and her simplicity and humility drew many girls to it. By educating and forming girls she laid foundations for the advancement of women in her surroundings. She prayed and fasted for sinners, visited them and urged them to conversion. In one of her letters to her spiritual director she wrote that God will give eternal life to those who convert sinners and bring them to the right path.

She died on June 8, 1926, in Kuzhikkattussery, at the age of fifty. The cause of death was a wound in her leg, made dangerous by diabetes. She was buried in the chapel of the Holy Family convent there. John Paul II beatified her in Rome on April 9, 2000, and Pope Francis canonized her in Saint Peter’s Square on October 13, 2019, together with four other blesseds, among them John Henry Newman.