THE SAINT NEXT DOOR

 

Another foreign born woman, who immigrated to the USA, giving her life for the work of Christ’s people was VENERABLE SR. MARIA THERESA  of the MOST HOLY TRINITY YSSELDIJK.

Born on November in 1897 in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, Teresa was raised in a devout Catholic family and grew in her love of the Sacred Heart.

Her father died when she was young and her family moved to Germany. She wanted to enter a convent, but her frail health initially prevented her from entering.

 When her health improved, she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of the Carmelites of the Divine Heart of Jesus, in Tilburg on October 2, 1917, at age 19, taking the name Sr. Maria Theresa of the Most Holy Trinity.

 The Carmelite convent she entered was not a cloistered one, as the sisters blended contemplative prayer with active apostolates in the world, such as teaching and caring for the sick and elderly.

 Having a zeal for missionary work, Sr. Maria Theresa gladly accepted the assignment of traveling with seven sisters to the United States in 1919, just two years after her entrance.

 When she reached the United States, her health quickly began to deteriorate again. She was diagnosed with a a severe kidney disease that was not caught in time. This led to a grueling five years of suffering in a convent in St. Charles, Missouri.

Her patience and joy in the midst of suffering was an inspiration to all her sisters. While she was never able to do any active missionary work in the United States, she united her suffering to Jesus Christ on the cross and bore everything with a smile, thereby winning untold graces for the missions.

In 1925, the year that St. Thérèse of Lisieux was canonized, the Carmelite sisters prayed a novena asking for Sister Theresia to recover. After the novena, Sister Theresia experienced, in prayer, a seemingly devastating message from the French saint: “You will only live a short time, but suffer much.” The young sister accepted the message as God’s will, saying she went “very gladly” to her father in heaven.

She died at the age of 28 on March 10, 1926 at St. Mary’s Hospital in St. Louis. Many began to pray for her intercession shortly after her death and healings were soon reported.

Sister Theresia’s fellow Carmelites never forgot her, but the effort to officially open and advance her sainthood cause took somewhat of a back seat to the promotion of the cause of their order’s foundress, Blessed Mother Maria Teresa of St. Joseph, who died in 1938 and was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006. Sister Theresia’s cause was officially opened in 2010 in the Diocese of Roermond, Netherlands, the location of the order’s motherhouse. 

Pope Leo XIV recently recognized the "heroic virtue" of Sr. Maria Theresa of the Most Holy Trinity, naming her, "venerable," one of the first steps on the road to canonization. She joins a growing list of "venerables" who worked in the United States. She would become the second woman to achieve sainthood while serving in the St. Louis region, after St. Rose Philippine Duchesne.

“I think a message that a lot of us need to really see and know and believe is that our hidden sufferings really do draw us into deeper communion with the Lord and intimacy with Him, if we let Him do that in us,” said Carmelite Sister Mary Michael, provincial vicar for the Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus South Central Province. ( interview with the Natl. Catholic Register)..