LEDÓCHOWSKA, Maria THERESIA. - Born at A. Loosdorf (Austria) on 29 Apr. 1863, died in Rome on 6 July 1922. Of exceptional intelligence, she was well versed in letters and the arts. Called to the court of Tuscany (1885), she remained there for five years. In 1890, after Cardinal Lavigerie’s appeal “to Christian women,” she left the court to dedicate herself to the struggle against slavery and to assist African missions. Extremely active, she developed brilliant propaganda to shape public opinion on the African question, traveling widely and boldly launching appeals throughout the world.
She was a pioneer in indigenous publishing, founding (1888) a missionary journal *Eco dell’Africa*, which she published in various languages. Later she added a supplement for youth: *Il fanciullo negro* for different nations; both still appear in about ten languages. She established polyglot printing presses—entirely entrusted to the Sisters of St Peter Claver—from which millions of pamphlets and volumes in 140 African languages and dialects were produced; she promoted and subsidized the establishment of printing presses in mission lands. Gathering around her cultured and generous collaborators, she refined her initiative through experience and gave life to a missionary religious congregation (1894) of distinctive structure: the “Sodalizio di S. Pietro Claver,” of which she was Superior General in its edition of the Sorrowful Heart of Jesus.
Having entered the Ursuline convent in Cracow (1886) and made profession there (1889), she was assigned to teaching. From 1904 she was superior of the Cracow convent, and, seeing certain situations that ill accorded with papal enclosure, she obtained from the Congregation of Religious permission to change solemn vows into simple vows corresponding to semi-enclosure. She established the first university residence for young ladies in Cracow and founded among students the Association of the Daughters of Mary.
Invited by Msgr Budkiewicz, parish priest of St Catherine’s in St Petersburg, to take charge of a boarding house for young Polish student exiles, she set out in secular dress, authorized by the cardinal archbishop and encouraged by Pius X. She overcame severe opposition, restoring order and discipline among the pupils and winning the hearts of her compatriots. When in 1911 the government’s intolerance toward Latin-rite Catholics intensified, she moved to Finland at Merentähti (Sortava), where she had a house and boarding school for ailing Polish girls, cared for poor Finnish fishermen, and translated the catechism into their language. With the outbreak of World War I (1914–18) she went into exile in Stockholm, where she opened a summer residence and later a language school at Djursholm, founded the little magazine *Solglinnstar* for Swedish Catholics, until the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. In 1917 she accepted the foundation of an orphanage in Denmark at Aalborg for the children of Polish emigrant workers. In 1919, after the war ended, she returned to Cracow and her original convent, but in 1920, through a providential combination of circumstances, she left to found a new branch of Ursulines with the principal aim of moral and intellectual education for young women of less advantaged classes and care for the poor, elderly, and children. Her beatification process is under way.