In 2015, we look back upon 130 years of our history, with more than 1300 women living as Missionary Benedictine Sisters. Over the coming months of the Year of Consecrated Life we will bring to you the histories of our Priories and Sisters across the World.
Our Congregation, having originated in Germany in 1885, did
not long delay in arriving in Brazil.
Soon after our establishment in East Africa, we accepted the invitation
to found a community in South America.
In December 1902, Mother Birgitta Korff, the Prioress
General, received a letter from Abbot Gérard van Caloen OSB of the Olinda
Monastery. Originally from Maredsous Monastery in Belgium, he greatly admired
the missionary endeavors of Father Andreas Amrhein, our founder.
Abbot Gérard wrote, “It is our intention to dedicate
ourselves to the missions among the Indian tribes in Brazil. We are already preparing our young monks for
this missionary task. Therefore, we also
need missionary sisters. To this end, it would be advisable that your congregation
establish a community in Brazil, perhaps in one of the cities on the
coast. I can offer you a large house and
a beautiful old church in Olinda (originally the first Santa Casa de
Misericórdia in Brazil). It is a very old building, with few amenities, but
very large and located in healthy surroundings, suitable for several different
types of good works. The ocean view is magnificent.”
On June 29, 1903, eight sisters left Saint Ottilien, which,
at that time, was the Motherhouse of the Congregation, since it was only
transferred to Tutzing in 1904. They arrived at the port of Recife on July 21.
Early on, Brazilian girls expressed the desire to join the
Congregation. Already in 1908, Abbot
Gérard suggested that the Congregation establish a novitiate in Olinda in order
to prepare Brazilian sisters for future missionary work in his prelacy in Rio
Branco, north of the Amazon River. On
August 10, 1909, Mother General Birgitta Korff signed a document authorizing
the establishment of a canonical novitiate “in foreign lands,” referring to
Olinda. It was in this novitiate, the first of our Congregation outside
Germany, that our first Brazilian Benedictine Missionary, Sister Brigida de
Oliveira, prepared for her profession.
Just a few days after the sisters’ arrival in Brazil,
already on August 3, 1903, the subprior, Father Wolgang, brought to the new
community the first orphan, a very active 7-8 year-old child. With this child,
an educational institute for orphans was born that grew into the School
Academia Santa Gertrudes in 1912.
After the founding of the first school, the education of
children and of adolescents became a priority. In 1920, our sisters accepted an
invitation to open a school in Caruaru, Colégio Sagrado Coração. To the present
day, our school remains the only school administered by a religious order in
that city, and it has always had a large number of students.
In 1943, right in the middle of World War II, this time in
Recife, the Priory assumed another school, Colégio Nossa Senhora do Carmo,
having bought it from Maria do Carmo
Lins e Melo, who had founded the Catholic school in 1919. The school served the
community for more than 90 years, before closing in 2011. By that time, the
surrounding formerly residential neighborhood had been transformed into a
commercial, business, hospital, and medical district. In 1955, the Colégio Imaculado Coração de
Maria was founded in a new residential neighborhood of Olinda. Due to steady, incremental
growth, today it is the Priory´s largest school.
In 1973 the College Faculdade de Ciências Humanas de Olinda
(FACHO) was founded and installed in the same building as the Academia Santa
Gertrudes, offering undergraduate degrees in education, psychology, and
languages. Presently, it occupies its own buildings, having expanded to include
undergraduate degrees in nursing, business administration, and accounting.
Early on, the schools in the Olinda Priory were involved in
social work in the poorest neighborhoods and in the slums/ shanty-towns. This
work gave rise to Social/Community Centers and Missionary Centers. In the 1970s
the social centers, Mizael Montenegro and St. José do Monte, began serving poor
communities, with sisters in residence.
In 1968, for the first time, a community of four sisters
started working in a parish with no resident parish priest in Porteiras, in the
state of Ceará. The intention of the Priory was to form small itinerant
communities to work with lay people in needy parishes so as to prepare them for
social and pastoral leadership roles in the different sectors of their
parish. In this way, the sisters would
then be able to move on to another poor community. To date, in the diocese of
Crato, in the state of Ceará, we have done this type of missionary work in four
towns: Porteiras, Campos Sales, Lavras and Palestina. In the state of
Pernambuco, in the diocese of Pesqueira, the community in Buique is on the
forefront of evangelization efforts.
This year, the community in the parish of Malhada de Pedras,
in the state of Bahia will be moving on, after having served there for 25
years. In the last two years, the parish
had a semi-resident parish priest who was responsible for two parishes,
alternating between them, week by week. In 2015, Malhada de Pedras will have a
permanent resident priest. The community of sisters will then move on to
another town, Lagoa Real, in the same diocese of Caetité, assuming
responsibility for that parish which has no resident priest.
Since the beginning of the Priory, our sisters have cared
also for the sick. However, it was only in 1970 that Saint Vicente de Paulo
Hospital opened its doors in Barbalha, Ceará, in the diocese of Crato. It has
become a large hospital, caring for as many as 1500 patients per day, in its
service of an expanding geographical area with few health care workers. As a
regional hospital, patients come to it from more than 50 surrounding towns and
cities. It works in tandem with the
governmental health care system.
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