Mary Frances Schervier

Mary Frances Schervier, known in German as Franziska Schervier, was born on 3 January 1819 in Aachen, then in the Kingdom of Prussia. She was a daughter of Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Schervier, a prosperous needle manufacturer who sat on the city council and later served as vice-mayor of Aachen, and of Maria Louise Migeon, who came from a French family settled in the Rhineland. The household was Catholic and relatively well-to-do, yet her childhood was marked by illness and bereavement. Her mother died of tuberculosis in 1832, around the time of Frances's First Communion, and two of her sisters likewise died of the same disease. After her mother's death she took on much of the care of the home. The contrast between her family's security and the destitution of factory workers, the sick, and abandoned women in industrial Aachen drew her toward works of mercy. She joined the Third Order of St. Francis and began privately to visit the poor, nurse the sick in their rooms, and assist women living on the margins of society.

Her father, though a practicing Catholic, did not wish her to enter a convent and relied on her to manage domestic affairs. Only after his death in 1845 did she gather companions for a common life of poverty and service. On 3 October 1845 Frances and four other women began the community that became the Congregation of the Poor Sisters of St. Francis (Arme Schwestern vom heiligen Franziskus). They adopted a Franciscan rule, supported themselves by work and alms, and devoted themselves to nursing the sick poor, caring for the elderly, visiting prisoners, and sheltering neglected children and women. The sisters soon opened a hospital in Aachen and other charitable houses in the Rhineland. They became known for remaining with cholera and other epidemic patients when many others fled. Diocesan approval allowed the institute to expand. Frances governed as foundress and superior, insisting on personal contact with the poorest rather than merely administrative charity.

In 1858, at the invitation of Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, members of the congregation went to the United States. They founded hospitals and other institutions, especially among German-speaking immigrants in the Ohio Valley, and later in additional American cities. Schervier herself traveled to North America in 1863, during the American Civil War, to visit the houses, encourage the sisters, and see their work among the wounded and the urban poor. She then returned to Europe, where the congregation continued to grow and where the sisters nursed soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. An American branch of the institute later developed its own identity as the Franciscan Sisters of the Poor, while the European congregation retained the name Poor Sisters of St. Francis. Throughout these years she held to a strict personal poverty and to the Franciscan emphasis on minority and trust in Providence.

In later life she suffered from asthma and other ailments but continued to reside at the motherhouse in Aachen and to guide the congregation. She died there on 14 December 1876. Veneration of her memory remained strong among her sisters and among those they served. After the usual process, Pope Paul VI beatified her on 28 April 1974; she has not been canonized. Her liturgical feast is kept on 14 December. She is remembered as a nineteenth-century foundress who joined contemplative Franciscan piety to organized care of the industrial poor, the sick, and the socially discarded in the German Rhineland and in the United States.