Venerable Annella Zervas

Mary Annella Zervas, O.S.B. (born Anna Cordelia Zervas; April 7, 1900 – August 14, 1926), was an American Catholic religious sister who joined the Benedictines and died at 26 after a three-year battle with pityriasis rubra pilaris. Until the 1960s, Zervas's grave in St. Joseph, Minnesota was considered a place of Christian pilgrimage, and it became one again around 2008. On October 15, 2023, Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston announced that he was beginning an inquiry into her life that could lead to the opening of a cause for her canonization. The US bishops voted to approve the cause on November 12, 2024, and it is scheduled to be formally opened on October 9, 2025. Zervas was born Anna Cordelia Zervas in Moorhead, Minnesota, on April 7, 1900. Her father, Hubert Zervas, an immigrant from the village of Immekeppel in the German Empire, was a butcher and ran a local meat market. Her mother, Emma (née Levitre) Zervas, was born in Saint-Theodore-d'Acton, Quebec, Canada. Zervas was raised in a large family that attended St. Joseph Catholic Church in Moorhead, where her father was the choir director and a member of the Knights of Columbus. At the time, the parochial school at St. Joseph's was looked after by monks and Sisters of the Benedictine Order. According to Alfred Mayer, who was then pastor of the parish, Zervas: Zervas's parents were reportedly very reluctant to part with her at such a young age, but Mayer advised them, "Don't put anything in her way; she is not too young to give herself to God." Several years later, Hubert Zervas wrote that he and his wife had then "gladly consented to give back the child to Him from Whom they had received her". Saint Benedict's Monastery accepted Zervas as a postulant in 1915, and she entered the novitiate in 1918. She is remembered as a quiet and unassuming member of the community who was fond of reading Geert Groote's The Following of Christ.