Marija Jula Ivanišević

Marija Jula Ivanišević, born Kata Ivanišević on 25 November 1893 in Čepin in Slavonia (then in the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia within Austria-Hungary), was a Croatian Catholic religious sister of the Congregation of the Daughters of Divine Charity. She entered that congregation, founded in Vienna in 1868 by Franziska Lechner for education and works of charity, and took the religious name Jula (often recorded in Croatian sources as Marija Jula). After formation and profession she served in houses of the congregation and was later appointed superior of the sisters’ community in Pale, a town in eastern Bosnia near Sarajevo, where the nuns conducted a school and charitable work among the local population. The Pale community included sisters of Croatian, Slovenian, and Austrian origin.

The Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and the creation of the Independent State of Croatia left eastern Bosnia a zone of competing Ustaše, Chetnik, and Partisan violence. In December 1941 Chetnik forces occupied Pale. The sisters attempted to reach safety in Sarajevo but were intercepted. As superior, Sister Jula was among four nuns taken toward Goražde; a fifth, the elderly Austrian Sister Berchmana Leidenix, was separated from the group and killed later that month. On the night of 15–16 December 1941 the four—Jula Ivanišević, Krizina Bojanc, Antonija Fabjan, and Bernadeta Banja—were raped and murdered in Goražde and their bodies thrown into the Drina River. They are known collectively as the Martyrs of Drina (Drinske mučenice).

Devotion to the group grew among Catholics in the region after the war. Their cause was introduced, and on 24 September 2011 they were beatified in Sarajevo by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, acting in the name of Pope Benedict XVI. Sister Jula and her companions are commemorated on 15 December as martyrs who remained faithful to their vows amid the wartime violence in the western Balkans. They have not been canonized.