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Biography

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Klara Ludwika Szczęsna was born Ludwika Szczęsna on 18 July 1863 in the village of Cieszki, in the parish of Żółkiewka in the Lublin region of Congress Poland, then under Russian imperial rule. She was the sixth of seven children of Antoni Szczęsny and Franciszka (née Skorupska). Her childhood was shaped by the early death of her mother in 1875, after which she took on substantial household duties. She received Confirmation in 1882. To support herself she trained and worked as a seamstress and spent a period in Lublin. In the constrained religious climate of the Russian partition, where many orders were banned or forced underground, she was drawn to consecrated life among the so-called hidden congregations associated with the Capuchin Honorat Koźmiński.

In 1886 she entered the Congregation of the Servants of Jesus. She made religious profession in 1889 and took the name Klara. In 1891 she was sent to Kraków, in Austrian-ruled Galicia, where canonical religious life could be lived more openly. There she met the priest Józef Sebastian Pelczar, a professor at the Jagiellonian University and later bishop of Przemyśl (canonized in 2003). Together they discerned a need for a community dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the pastoral and social care of girls and women, especially domestic servants and the working poor of a rapidly urbanizing city.

On 15 April 1894 Pelczar and Szczęsna founded in Kraków the Congregation of the Sister Servants of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. Szczęsna became the first superior general and formed the institute in a spirituality of devotion to the Heart of Jesus, Eucharistic life, and practical works of mercy. Under her direction the sisters undertook care of servants, factory workers, the sick, and girls in need of protection and education. She was remembered for humility, firm religious discipline, and close attention to both the interior life of the community and the material hardships of those they served. She remained the congregation’s principal guide through its founding decades.

Szczęsna spent her last years in Kraków, leading the community during the First World War. She died there on 7 February 1916 after a serious illness. She was buried in Kraków; her memory was preserved by the congregation she had helped to found. The cause of beatification advanced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Pope Benedict XVI recognized her heroic virtues and declared her Venerable on 20 December 2012. Pope Francis authorized her beatification, which was celebrated in Kraków on 27 June 2015. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 7 February. She has not been canonized.

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