Maria Hueber

Maria Hueber was born on 22 May 1653 in Brixen (Bressanone), in the Prince-Bishopric of Brixen within the County of Tyrol in the Holy Roman Empire. She was the youngest of five children of the saddler Nikolaus Hueber and his wife Anna Hofer. The household was poor, and her father died in 1662, when she was still a child. After his death the children were placed with relatives; Hueber spent a period with an uncle in Bolzano (Bozen) before returning to Brixen. She received her First Communion in the mid-1660s and from early youth was noted for piety, prayer, and a desire to serve the poor. Formal opportunities for a girl of her station were few, and she did not enter a cloistered convent in adolescence.

As a young woman she worked as a domestic servant in households in Brixen and later in Innsbruck, helping to support her family. In 1672 she was received into the Third Order of Saint Francis, taking up Franciscan tertiary spirituality while remaining in secular life. She returned to Brixen around 1677 to nurse her ailing mother, who died in 1679. Thereafter she lived in the house of a widow and began to teach that widow’s children and other poor girls of the town. In a region where systematic schooling for girls was almost unknown, this informal instruction met a real pastoral and social need and became the core of her later vocation.

In the later 1690s Hueber joined forces with another tertiary, Maria Elisabeth Renner. The two resolved to live in community and to devote themselves to the Christian education of girls. On 12 September 1700, with the approval of the Prince-Bishop of Brixen, Johann Franz von Khuen, they and two companions established a small convent in Brixen. The foundation, known as the Tertiary Sisters of Saint Francis (Terziarschwestern des heiligen Franziskus), conducted what is regarded as the first school for girls in the Tyrol. The sisters combined the observance of the Franciscan Third Order with teaching and the care of poor and neglected girls, offering elementary learning together with religious formation.

Hueber remained the guiding figure of the new community until her death in Brixen on 31 July 1705. The congregation survived her and later expanded its educational and charitable work. A cause for beatification was opened in the Catholic Church, and she was named a Servant of God. In 2019 Pope Francis authorized the decree on her heroic virtues, declaring her Venerable. She has not been beatified or canonized and has no universally established feast day or list of patronages. Her memory is preserved especially in the Diocese of Bolzano-Brixen and among the Tertiary Sisters of Saint Francis, who regard her as foundress and as an example of perseverance in poverty, Franciscan spirituality, and the education of girls in early modern Tyrol.