Blessed Łucja Szewczyk

Małgorzata Szewczyk (1828 – 5 June 1905), also known by her religious name Łucja, was a Polish religious sister and the foundress of the Daughters of the Sorrowful Mother of God – or "Seraphic Sisters"; she was also a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis. Her life was dedicated to the care of ill people and she even spent a long period to that end in Israel and Palestine before returning to her native Poland where she became a close collaborator of Honorat Kozminski. Her initiatives to aid the poor and those in need included tending to elder women in her apartments or in going to hospitals and in the streets to help those that needed her charitable assistance. Her beatification cause started on 25 August 1993 and she later became titled as Venerable on 19 December 2011; she was beatified in Poland on 9 June 2013. Małgorzata Szewczyk was born circa 1828 in Shepetivka - now modern Ukraine - to Jan and Marianna; her mother was her father's second wife and had a daughter with his deceased former wife. In her childhood she lost her parents - her father in 1835 and her mother in 1837 - and her older half-sister oversaw her care and upbringing as a result. Her half-sister taught her basic arithmetic and had married at this point but still took good care of her. Sometime from 1837 to 1840 she made her First Communion and received her confirmation. Her call to the religious life was constant and so in 1848 she entered the Third Order of Saint Francis. Due to the political situation in her occupied Poland she was not able to join a second religious order. To strengthen her faith and love for God in 1870 she undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; this moved her to a profound degree and her experience prompted her to dedicate her life to help the poor and the ill as well as the old.