A woman for unity” “

“Pioneer of ecumenism”. That’s how John Paul II called Maria Elisabetta Hesselblad on the day he beatified her (9 April 2000). Born into a Lutheran family in Sweden in 1870, ever since her adolescence she felt a strong desire to devote her own life to Christian unity. “Ever since I was a child – she says in her Memoirs –, when I went to school and saw that my classmates belonged to many different Churches, I began to ask myself what was the true Fold, because I had read in the New Testament that there was only one Fold and one Shepherd”. At the age of 18 she emigrated to America to help her family and donned the Bridgettine habit in Rome in 1904. She refounded the St. Bridget Order. The loving care and zeal she showed for the Roman people, and especially for the persecuted Jews during the Second World War are well known. She died, after a long life marked by suffering and illness, in the House of St. Bridget in Rome on 24 April 1957. The State of Israel will inscribe her name in the Roll of the Just on 3 June 2005. Reading history and the history of each person in the light of the Spirit leads to discoveries that expand the soul and make it grow in its consciousness of being a child of God, destined to live for ever, once the threshold of time has been overcome, in the trinitarian love. Elisabetta Hesselblad bore within herself a Lutheran heritage, strong and secure, gifts of character linked to her Swedish roots, together with a financial precariousness which forced her to seek personal independence, but she did not restrict it to her own well-being: on the contrary, she was urged by it to consider the good of every member of her family and anyone who happened to cross her path. Whence came this spiritual and social attitude? From God himself, who made his eruption into a young girl only nine years old, entrusting to her a mission that was to characterise her whole existence: “The only Fold for the Church of Christ”. From her native Sweden she moved to America in 1888, at the age of only 18, to earn her own livelihood and to help maintain her family. Her life took her from the painful abandonment of study to a nursing diploma and admission in studies of medicine; from hospital and domiciliary service for rich and poor without distinction to the sharing of life with two rich spinsters; from a proud Lutheranism to the most transparent Catholicism; from a secular life spent in continuous journeys to cloistered life in a Carmelite convent in Rome; from friendships forged in various continents to ecumenical spiritual bonds scattered all over the world; from her mother tongue, Swedish, to the many languages she learnt in her ecclesial service; from the difficult transition from the Carmelite order to another ecclesial reality, ancient but undiscovered, that of the Bridgettine charism. In Maria Hesselblad two tensions were always alive: her childhood perception of the one Fold to be realized in the House of St. Bridget in Rome and her inadequacies, physical (real) and spiritual (supposed), continually re-dedicated to God so that he might shape them as he desired. On this human terrain, simultaneously rich and poor, an ancient seed, which some might have considered dead, was to give rise to a flourishing tree: the Spirit reserved for Maria Elisabetta the gift of reviving the ancient Order of the Holy Saviour that her compatriot Bridget of Sweden, now patron of Europe, had founded in the 14th century. The reflowering of the ancient charism would also lead to the discovery of a new way of life, that of the Order of St. Bridget, whose members are now scattered all over the world and who devote their life to Christian unity. Her love for the needy immediately took tangible form and the terrible Nazi persecution did not terrify her: she opened her heart and her house to her persecuted Jewish brothers and sisters. Maria Elisabetta knew no barriers to her charity. She was animated by real respect, by genuine consciousness of the common roots that make Jews and Christians brothers, as John Paul II asserted, and friends, as more recently emphasised by Benedict XVI. Sweden honoured her with the award of the Star of the North; the Church proclaimed her a Blessed in 2000; and the State of Israel will inscribe her name in the Roll of the Just on 3 June. The ceremony will bring together many authorities in the Bridgettine convent in the Piazza Farnese in Rome, and innumerable friends will join in the celebrations worldwide. In this declaration of belonging to the “just” we will once again find, in a mysterious way, Maria Elisabetta’s profound vocation to the one Fold: for it is in the holy root, in Israel, that each person finds spiritual nourishment, all those, that is, who before God and their conscience, have lived in justice, that is by putting into practice God’s commandments and serving God and their fellowmen. They are stars that shine in the darkness of history and in the splendour of the heavens. The Jewish people show their particular love for the just, because they have been taught to do so by God, and this message is a source of hope. We are not alone: the just are with us, Maria Elisabetta is with us.