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 Agonizing.
Having entered the Ursuline convent of Kraków (1886) and made her profession there (1889), she was assigned to teaching. From 1904 she was superior of the convent of Kraków, and, in view of certain de facto situations that ill accorded with papal enclosure, she obtained from the Congregation of Religious the change of solemn vows into simple vows corresponding to semi-enclosure. She established the first university residence for young ladies in Kraków and founded among the students the Association of the Daughters of Mary.
Invited by Msgr. Budkiewicz, parish priest of the church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg, to assume the direction of a boarding school for young Polish women exiles, she set out in secular dress, authorized by the cardinal archbishop and encouraged by Pius X. She overcame very grave opposition, restoring order and discipline in the boarding school, winning over the minds of her compatriots. When the government's intolerance toward Catholics of the Latin rite grew harsher in 1911, she moved to Finland to Merentähti (Sortavala), where she had a house and a boarding school for Polish girls of delicate health, caring for the poor Finnish fishermen, translating the catechism into their language. When the World War of 1914-18 began, she went into exile in Stockholm, where she opened a summer boarding house and then a school of languages at Djursholm, founded the little newspaper Solglinstar for Swedish Catholics, until, when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, she accepted, in 1917, the founding of an orphanage for the children of Polish emigrant workers, in Denmark at Aalborg. In 1919, the war over, she returned to Kraków to her original convent, from which, however, in 1920, through a providential combination of circumstances, she separated herself, founding a new branch of Ursulines with the principal aim of the moral and intellectual education of young women of the less well-off classes and the care of the poor, the old and children. Her process of beatification is in progress.
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Arnaldo Lanz