On Sunday, June 5, Pope Francis canonized St. Maria Elisabeth Hesselblad (1870 – 1957), a Swedish-born nurse and convert to Catholicism who reestablished the Bridgettines.

It is possible that St. Elisabeth, as a young adult in the 1890s, encountered some of the early Paulist Fathers when she was a nursing student and a worker at Roosevelt Hospital (now Mt. Sinai West) on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Our community’s first house was located just steps from the hospital (what we would today say is “just across West 59th Street”).

Paulist Fr. Don Campbell, borrowing from her biography, writes:

“Maria Elisabeth Hesselblad came to New York circa 1890 and worked at Roosevelt Hospital. She was educated as a nurse while working there. Once, she was down in the morgue at Roosevelt and got locked in alone over night with all the dead bodies. She thought she heard a slight noise and discovered that one of them was actually alive. She massaged his hands, feet, covered with some of her own clothes to warm him and he was restored to life!

“She was not a Catholic at that time but a biography mentions that she made sure that the Paulists were called if any Catholics requested a visit from a priest: ‘When a patient seemed near death and there was no one to send for a priest, she herself ran over to the Paulist Fathers at the nearby Catholic Church, in the night, in storm, in rain, and cold … One night, when she had run out in a frightful storm to call a priest for a dying man who had really wandered from the ‘narrow path,’ the old Father said to her, as he went back to his church: ‘God bless you, dear little sister. God reward you for your thoughtfulness, your warmth — you cannot yet understand, unfortunately, what a wonderful service you are doing for so many, so many … Someday, you will understand .. You will find the way … Maria smiled to herself. She was only glad she had helped her patient and made the old man happy.'”

Her New York years are just a small part of St. Elisabeth’s story. In 1943 and 1944, during the German occupation of Italy, she helped to hide a Jewish family and two political fugitives. For this, she was recognized as one of “The Righteous Among Nations” by Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem.

For a detailed account, visit Yad Vashem’s website.

We pray in thanksgiving for the canonization of this holy woman who many decades ago likely was knocking on our door!