Venerable Angela Maria Autsch

Angela Maria Autsch, baptized as Maria Cäcilia Autsch, religious name Angela Maria of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (26 March 1900 – 23 December 1944), was a German religious sister of the Congregation Sisters of the Most Holy Trinity. Her beatification process was opened in 1992. Maria Cäcilia Autsch was born in Röllecken, part of Attendorn in the Olpe district of (Westphalia), German Empire on 26 March 1900. She was a member of a modest working-class family (her father was a quarry worker) that regularly practised the Catholic faith. She went to school in the village of Bamenohl. The terrible economic situation in the Weimar Republic meant that she had to go out to work in the clothing store Bischoff & Broegger in Finnentrop, where she was popular amongst both fellow workers and customers Maria was thirty-three years old when she joined the Trinitarian Sisters of Valence in Mötz, Austria. Upon her investiture on 4 July 1934 she was given the religious name Angela Maria of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She made her first vows on 16 August 1934 and her solemn vows on 28 September 1938, the year Hitler annexed Austria. Since the Gauleiter at that time wanted to report a "monastery-free Tyrol" to Hitler on his birthday in April 1939, the convent in Mötz was to be confiscated. When the Nazi party tried to expropriate the convent, Sr. Autsch, who represented the mother superior, succeeded in saving it by claiming the Tyrolean monastery was Spanish property. Official records lack any substantive justification for Sr. Angela's imprisonment, so the prevailing theory is, that her attitude led to her arrest. In March 1940, she disapproved of her nephew's volunteering for the air force. She wrote in a letter: "It will be horrible ... It will be stormy for all nations! We ... are only there for Him." In March 1940, she wrote that it was necessary to "pray for the hard-pressed monasteries". On 10 August 1940, Sr. Angela, who took care of a sick woman, went to buy some milk.