Maria Theresia Scherer

Maria Theresia Scherer was born Anna Maria Katharina Scherer on 31 October 1825 in Meggen, in the canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. She came from a poor rural family and lost her father while still a young child, after which the household could not keep all the children together. Katharina was placed with relatives and later worked in domestic service. Those early years of insecurity and firsthand knowledge of rural poverty formed the background to her later commitment to the sick, orphans, and the destitute.

Drawn to religious life, she entered in 1845 the Institute of Teaching Sisters of the Holy Cross at Menzingen, a community founded the previous year by the Capuchin priest Theodosius Florentini together with Maria Bernarda Heimgartner. She received the religious name Maria Theresia. After formation she taught in several Swiss localities. Florentini, who was also promoting hospital reform and care for industrial workers, soon directed some sisters into nursing. Scherer was among those assigned to this newer apostolate, which created practical and canonical tensions with the original teaching institute at Menzingen.

In 1856 Florentini established a distinct congregation, the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross, at Ingenbohl in the canton of Schwyz, using a former Capuchin convent as the motherhouse. Maria Theresia Scherer became its first superior general in 1857 and remained in that office until her death more than three decades later. Under her leadership the Ingenbohl Sisters opened hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, and other works of mercy across Switzerland and then in neighboring German-speaking lands. She was known as a determined administrator who combined personal austerity with a spirituality centered on the Cross and on practical charity.

Her collaboration with Florentini was fruitful but not without conflict over authority, finances, and the independence of the sisters. After his death in 1865 she consolidated the congregation’s identity and its standing with church and civil authorities. By the later nineteenth century the Ingenbohl Sisters had become one of the significant women’s religious institutes of German-speaking Switzerland. Scherer died at the motherhouse in Ingenbohl on 16 June 1888. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 29 October 1995. Her feast is observed on 16 June.