Blessed Hildegard Burjan

Hildegard Lea Burjan (née Hildegard Freund; 30 January 1883 – 11 June 1933) was an Austrian politician and convert from Judaism to the Roman Catholic Church. She founded the Sisterhood of Caritas Socialis. Burjan set up several organizations for the promotion of women's rights and for the rights of all workers and their families and this even saw her elected to the Austrian Parliament where she served until her retirement due to ill health. A beatification process for Hildegard Burjan commenced under Pope John Paul II in 1982. Pope Benedict XVI beatified her in 2012; Cardinal Angelo Amato presided over the celebration on the pope's behalf. Hildegard Freund was born to non-practicing Jewish parents in the German Empire in 1883 as the second-born to Abraham and Berta Freund. The Freunds relocated to Berlin in 1895, where she was sent to high school and the Freunds relocated once more in 1899 to Switzerland where she studied in Zurich at the college there. Freund graduated from high school in 1903 after the completion of her examinations and then began her college studies. Freund studied German literature as well as philosophical and sociological studies under the two Protestant professors Saitschik and Foerster in Switzerland, and then in Berlin, when she returned in 1907 to also start an economics course; she obtained a doctorate in 1908. On 2 May 1907 she married the Hungarian entrepreneur Alexander Burjan (26 November 1882 - 6 November 1973). In October 1908 she suffered from severe renal colic that forced her hospitalization on 9 October at the Saint Hedwig Catholic Hospital in Berlin where she underwent several operations. Just before Easter 1909, the condition got to the point where doctors gave up all hope but she was healed from this grave illness after Easter on 12 April 1909. It was during her hospitalization that she came to admire the work of the Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo.