Emma Üffing

Emma Üffing, known in religion as Sister Maria Euthymia, was born on 8 April 1914 in the village of Halverde in Westphalia, then part of the German Empire. She was the fifth of eleven children of the farmer August Üffing and his wife Maria, née Schmidt, and was baptized in the local parish a few days after her birth. The household was Catholic and of modest rural means. In childhood she suffered from rickets, which left her physically delicate, yet she took part as she could in farm and household work. She received First Communion and Confirmation in 1924. After elementary school she remained at home for a time and later worked in domestic service, while a desire to enter religious life and to serve the sick took shape.

In the 1930s she sought admission to the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of Münster, the Clemensschwestern, a community founded in the early nineteenth century for nursing and the care of the poor. She entered the congregation, received the religious name Maria Euthymia, and made her first profession of vows in 1936. She trained as a nurse and pronounced perpetual vows in 1939. That year she was sent to Saint Vincent Hospital in Dinslaken, in the Ruhr, and assigned to demanding wards, including those for infectious disease. Superiors and colleagues noted her reliability, even temper, and readiness to take on work others found repulsive or exhausting.

The Second World War brought air raids, overcrowding, and a stream of wounded and displaced people. Sister Maria Euthymia nursed German soldiers but also prisoners of war and forced laborers of other nationalities, giving them the same attention she gave her own people at a time when such impartiality was neither required nor always welcomed. Witnesses later described her as kind, discreet, and hardworking, drawing strength from prayer and the Eucharist. After the war she remained in nursing until 1948, when she was transferred to the congregation’s motherhouse in Münster and placed in charge of the laundry. The assignment was hidden, physically heavy, and far from the hospital wards in which she had become known; she accepted it in obedience and organized the work with care for the sisters and institutions that depended on it.

In 1955 an intestinal carcinoma was diagnosed. She submitted to treatment and to the progress of the disease without bitterness, offering her suffering in a spirit of faith. She died in Münster on 9 September 1955, aged forty-one. A reputation for holiness spread among the Clemensschwestern and among lay people who had known her wartime charity. The cause for beatification was introduced in due course, and on 7 October 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified her in Saint Peter’s Square, presenting her as a model of humble service and of charity that does not distinguish among the suffering. The Church commemorates Blessed Maria Euthymia Üffing on 9 September. She has not been canonized.