Saint Elisabeth Hesselblad

Maria Elizabeth Hesselblad, OSsS (4 June 1870 – 24 April 1957), was a Swedish Catholic religious sister who founded a new, active, branch of the Bridgettines known as the Bridgettine Sisters. Hesselblad is recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations due to her efforts in World War II saving the lives of Jews during the genocide of the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II beatified her on 9 April 2000 and Pope Francis canonised her 5 June 2016 at Saint Peter's Square. Maria Elizabeth Hesselblad born on 4 June 1870 as the fifth of thirteen children born to August Robert Hesselblad and Cajsa Petersdotter Dag – Lutheran parents from Fåglavik in Västra Götaland County. She was baptized the following month and received into the Lutheran Church of Sweden in her parish of Hudene. By 1886, she had to work to help them make ends meet. At first, she looked for work in Sweden, but eventually immigrated to the United States in 1888, where she studied nursing at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. While there, she did home nursing, which brought her into contact with the Catholic faith of many of the poor for whom she cared. In 1896, Elizabeth decided to leave hospital work for private duty nursing. She became a nurse and companion to two teenage daughters of wealthy Catholics, the Cisneros family. She developed an interest in the Catholic Church while deep prayer and personal study led her down the path of conversion and on 15 August 1902, the Feast of the Assumption, she received conditional baptism from a Jesuit priest, Johann Georg Hagen, in the chapel of the Georgetown Visitation Monastery in Washington, D.C. Hagen also became her spiritual director. As Elisabeth Hasselblad reflected on that moment, she wrote: "In an instant the love of God was poured over me. I understood that I could respond to that love only through sacrifice and a love prepared to suffer for His glory and for the Church.