Maria Theresia Haze

Jeanne Haze, known in religion as Marie Thérèse (Maria Theresia), was born in 1782 in Liège, then capital of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, an ecclesiastical state of the Holy Roman Empire. Her family belonged to the city’s administrative milieu; her father served in the household or chancery of the last prince-bishop. In the 1790s French Revolutionary armies occupied Liège, the prince-bishopric was abolished, and religious houses and church institutions were suppressed. The Haze family went into exile and later returned to a city that had been absorbed into France and, after 1815, into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. War, secularization, and economic distress left Liège with widespread poverty and a weakened structure of Catholic schooling and charity. Those conditions shaped her youth and her later work.

In the early nineteenth century Jeanne, together with her sister, began to teach poor girls in Liège, at first as laywomen, while older religious orders were still only partly restored. Belgian independence in 1830 and the reorganization of the Diocese of Liège created room for new congregations. With the support of Bishop Cornelius van Bommel, Jeanne Haze and her companions formed a community of women religious in 1833, the Congregation of the Daughters of the Cross (Filles de la Croix). She took the name Marie Thérèse and became the foundress and first superior. The sisters professed poverty, chastity, and obedience and devoted themselves to the education of girls, especially the poor, and to nursing and other works of mercy. Their spirituality was centered on the Cross and on practical service in a city entering the industrial age.

From the Liège motherhouse the congregation spread to other Belgian towns and, during the nineteenth century, to several countries in Europe and to mission territories, with houses engaged in schools and care of the sick. Mother Marie Thérèse remained the governing figure of the institute into old age. She never married and had no children; her adult life was given to teaching, foundation, and the government of her congregation. She died in Liège in 1876, at the age of ninety-three.

Her reputation for holiness rested on perseverance through political upheaval and on a lasting work of education and charity. The Catholic Church opened a cause for her beatification. Pope John Paul II beatified her in 1991; she has not been canonized. Her liturgical memorial is 7 January, the anniversary of her death. She is remembered above all in Liège and among the Daughters of the Cross as a foundress who turned the disruption of the revolutionary and Napoleonic era into a stable community dedicated to the poor.