I want to share some of the stories of my sisters... not sisters as I am to my brother, but sisters who are members of my congregation. We are Roman Catholic, approved by the Church and international. We were founded in 1868 by a Bavarian peasant woman named Franziska Lechner. She fell in love with God at an early age and spent some years in adventures and failures to search out how to serve God and others. By the time she died in 1894 about six hundred women had joined her. They opened women's residences and schools all over the Austro-Hungarian empire.
I got to know them when I came from Public School to a Catholic High School here. I couldn't get over how these sisters joked and laughed with us. I went home and said, "Mom, these nuns laugh!" I will write here some stories as I was told them or remember them. I will disguise names and sometimes places and I take the liberty to prepare the stories in a literary interesting manner, but basically they will be true.
Mother Elizabeth and the Spy
It was in the middle of World War II. Times were hard when a stranger knocked at the convent door. He said he was an anti-nazi artist who had fled Budapest and now was just searching for a way to live. He had a bed somewhere but he needed just enough to buy himself some food and an occasional new shirt. He offered to paint our little chapel. His sample painting was beautiful and in a style reminiscent of Budapest churches, so Mother agreed. Our house was situated high on a hill overlooking the entrance to New York Harbor. He asked if he could eat his lunch on the roof.
Some time later the FBI appeared at the convent door. They had intecepted a courier who was carrying harbor shipping sketches to the Germans. When artists analyzed the drawings they knew they had to come from our property. Mother Elizabeth told of the artist on the roof and the next day he was arrested as he went for his lunch hour.
This is Mother Franziska Lechner. She was born in a small village in Bavaria, Germany in 1833. She learned from the very real piety of her family and her Catholic environment that she was precious as an infinitely loved child of the Heavenly Father. From the earliest days she wanted to return this love and began a search for how to best use her gifts this purpose.
