Saint Who?
Saints Who Lost Loved Ones
Blessed Pauline von Mallinckrodt
Foundress († 1881) Feast: April 30
Pauline von Mallinckrodt was born in Germany to a Lutheran father and a Catholic mother. As a teenager, she fell in love with a good man who was not Catholic; she resolved to break off connections with him after reflecting upon the importance of religious unanimity in marriage. Still it was a heartbreak. “In renouncing him,” she wrote, “I broke every fetter which attached me to the world.” God soon rewarded her with a great sense of peace.
When Pauline was seventeen, her mother fell ill. Knowing she would die, she prepared Pauline for her new role as mistress of the home. “Always be in the presence of God; try to please your father, and care well for him and for the children. Recommend your brothers and sister to our confessor.… My spirit will always be with you.”
“The loss of my mother,” Pauline recalled, “aroused in me a desire for heaven, whither she had gone ahead. I longed for the time when death would part the screen which separates this life from the eternal.” As lady of the house, Pauline was a joy to her father. And she was kind and patient with her little brothers, who nicknamed her die gute Alte (“the good old lady”), a nickname she retained.
Pauline went on to found the Sisters of Christian Charity to care for and teach the sick and the poor. After some three decades of service, she died in 1881.
Heavenly Father, through the prayers of Blessed Pauline, may we have the courage to detach ourselves from
all attachments that do not bring us closer to you.
