The founder

History

Mother Francesca della Croce Streitel

A story like many others seems to begin on 24 November 1844 in Mellrichstad, Germany, at the birth of Amalia, the first of four children of Judge Adam Streitel and Francesca Carolina Hohrhammer.
Baptised in the Catholic Church, she was brought up to care for the poor and to meditate on the love of Christ, who gave himself on the cross for the salvation of souls. She decided to respond to this “waste of love” with a path of special consecration, which she began at the age of twenty-two by entering the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary Stern, dedicated to teaching and caring for the sick.
Always and totally intent on seeking God’s will, she did not close herself off from the breath of the Spirit and guided by the desire to be alone with God alone, all for Him, she withdrew to the Carmelite monastery of Himmelspforten. In the silence of the cloister, in the experience of community life, she feels called to share, in the footsteps of Francis of Assisi, the discovery of this loving gaze of God on every creature to walk with the poorest towards such a Father.
Called to ‘unite ACTIVE LIFE with CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE’ she leaves Carmel, but headed towards where?


After a short time with her family, she was invited to Rome where Father Jordan sought help in setting up the women’s branch of the Apostolic Society for Education.
In the shadow of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, where she arrived on 16 February 1883, the first community began to form, of which Amalie, who took the name Francesca della Croce, was appointed superior. The Spirit called the two to different paths and so on 4 October 1885, after a painful ordeal, the communities led by Mother Frances and Father Jordan separated: the Sisters of Charity of the Mother of Sorrows, known as the Sisters of Our Lady of Sorrows, were born.
Poor among the poor, anchored in the contemplation of Christ, with Mary at the foot of the cross, nourished by participation in the sacraments and the prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours, the sisters placed themselves beside the crosses of those they met, so that in an embrace, a smile, a word of hope they might encounter God.

Resigned from the post of Superior General because of some misunderstandings that had arisen around her, Mother Frances accepted everything from God’s hands and, sustained by the certainty that “it’s all right, God has allowed it”, she lived the last years of her life at Castel Sant’Elia, serving the little ones in the nursery school, caring for the sick and doing all she could with a mother’s heart for “her” sisters.
She died in the fragrance of holiness after a long agony on 6 March 1911, the day on which Pope Pius X approved the Constitutions of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother.
At her death, the sisters were not only in Europe (Italy, Austria and Germany), but also in the USA.
On the twelfth of October 1936, the process of canonisation, which is still ongoing, began.
On the twenty-seventh of March 2010 we received from His Holiness Benedict XVI the proclamation of the Venerability of the Servant of God, Mother Frances of the Cross Streitel.

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