LEDÓCHOWSKA, ORSOLA (GIULIA). – Born on 17 April 1865 at Loosdorf (Austria), died in Rome on 29 May 1939, foundress and first superior general of the Ursulines of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Agony.
Having entered the Ursuline convent of Cracow (1886) and made her profession there (1889), she was assigned to teaching. From 1904 she was superior of the convent of Cracow and, observing certain circumstances that were incompatible with papal enclosure, obtained from the Congregation of Religious the conversion of the solemn vows into simple vows corresponding to semi-enclosure. She established the first university residence for young women in Cracow and founded the Association of the Daughters of Mary among the students.
Invited by mons. Budkiewicz, parish priest of the church of St Catherine in Petersburg, to assume the direction of a boarding school for young Polish student exiles, she departed in secular dress, authorized by the cardinal archbishop and encouraged by Pius X. She overcame the gravest opposition by restoring order and discipline in the school, winning the goodwill of her compatriots. When the government’s intolerance toward Catholics of the Latin rite intensified in 1911, she moved to Finland, to Merentähti (Sortava), where she had a house and a boarding school for Polish girls in poor health, caring for the poor Finnish fishermen and translating the catechism into their language. When the First World War began in 1914, she went into exile in Stockholm, where she opened a summer residence and then a language school at Djursholm; she founded the newspaper Solglinstar for Swedish Catholics. Then, when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, she accepted, in 1917, the establishment of an orphanage for the children of emigrant Polish workers in Aalborg, Denmark. In 1919, when the war had ended, she returned to Cracow, to the convent of her origin, from which, however, in 1920, through a providential combination of circumstances, she separated, founding a new branch of Ursulines whose principal aims were the moral and intellectual education of young women from less affluent classes and the care of the poor, the elderly, and children. Her beatification process is currently under way.