Karolina Gerhardinger

Karolina Gerhardinger was born on 20 June 1797 in Stadtamhof, then a small town on the Danube adjoining Regensburg in Bavaria. Her father worked as a skipper on the river. She was educated by the Canonesses of Notre Dame in Regensburg and later taught in her hometown. Early-nineteenth-century secularization in Bavaria had closed many convent schools and left few Catholic institutions for the education of girls, especially the poor. Under the spiritual direction of the priest Georg Michael Wittmann she discerned a vocation to found a religious community devoted to that work.

On 24 October 1833, at Neunburg vorm Wald, she and two companions began the community that became the Poor School Sisters of Notre Dame. She took the religious name Maria Theresa of Jesus. Wittmann, recently named bishop of Regensburg, died the same year, and the young institute faced poverty and uncertainty. In the early 1840s King Ludwig I of Bavaria granted the sisters the former Poor Clare monastery of St. James on the Anger in Munich, which became the motherhouse. From Munich the congregation spread through Bavaria and into other German-speaking lands.

In 1847 Mother Theresa crossed the Atlantic with a small group of sisters to found houses in the United States, where bishops sought German-speaking teachers for immigrant children. The first American convent was established at St. Marys in Pennsylvania; further foundations followed, notably in Baltimore. After organizing the mission she returned to Europe. A prolonged conflict with some bishops over whether the congregation should remain under a single superior general or be divided into diocesan communities occupied her later decades; she insisted on centralized government so that sisters could be sent wherever they were most needed. Papal recognition of the institute and its rule was eventually obtained.

She spent her last years at the Munich motherhouse, directing a congregation that had grown to several hundred members in Europe and North America. Karolina Gerhardinger died in Munich on 9 May 1879. Pope John Paul II beatified her on 17 November 1985. The School Sisters of Notre Dame continue her educational apostolate on several continents. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 9 May.