Clara Fey

Clara Fey was born on 11 April 1815 in Aachen, then in the Kingdom of Prussia, into a prosperous Catholic family engaged in the textile trade. Her father died while she was still a young child, an event that left a lasting mark on the household. She grew up in a city that was becoming a major centre of Rhineland industry and received a careful education amid the piety of the post-Napoleonic Catholic revival. From early on she was struck by the numbers of poorly clothed and untaught children in the working-class quarters of Aachen, and she came to regard their destitution as a personal call to practical charity.

Together with a small circle of friends she began, in the later 1830s, to gather neglected girls for religious instruction, elementary schooling, and material help. This informal apostolate took a stable religious form in 1844, when Fey and her companions constituted themselves as a community under the title of the Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus. Their charism was imitation of the poverty and hiddenness of the Child Jesus, expressed in the education and care of poor, orphaned, and abandoned children. Fey became the first superior of the new congregation. Houses and schools multiplied in the Rhineland and beyond, and the institute obtained diocesan approval and subsequent papal recognition that allowed it to develop as a religious congregation.

The Prussian Kulturkampf of the 1870s imposed severe legal restrictions on Catholic religious orders. The Sisters of the Poor Child Jesus were among those forced to abandon their houses in Prussia. Fey oversaw the transfer of the motherhouse across the border to Simpelveld in the Netherlands, from which the congregation continued its work and expanded internationally. She remained the central figure of the institute through these years of exile and died at Simpelveld on 8 May 1894.

A reputation for holiness attached to her memory among the sisters and among those who had known her work for poor children. The cause for her beatification was later introduced. Pope John Paul II recognized the heroic character of her virtues and declared her Venerable in 1991. After approval of a miracle attributed to her intercession, she was beatified on 5 May 2018 in Aachen Cathedral, in a rite celebrated in the name of Pope Francis. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 8 May, the anniversary of her death.