Mary of the Divine Heart

Maria Droste zu Vischering, known in religion as Mary of the Divine Heart, was born on 8 September 1863 in Münster, in the Prussian province of Westphalia, into the Droste zu Vischering family, a prominent Catholic noble house. The family had a long tradition of service to the Church; an earlier relative, Clemens August Droste zu Vischering, had been Archbishop of Cologne and a well-known defender of ecclesiastical independence. She was born at the Erbdrostenhof in Münster and grew up on family estates in an environment of aristocratic Catholic practice. She received a private education typical of her class and from youth displayed a serious religious temperament, including concern for the poor and for personal holiness. Although marriage and a place in landed society would have been the ordinary path for a young countess, she became convinced of a call to consecrated life.

In 1888 she entered the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd in Münster and took the name Sister Mary of the Divine Heart. The congregation, developed in the nineteenth century from the older Order of Our Lady of Charity, devoted itself to the pastoral care of girls and women in moral or social distress. After formation and profession she served in Germany before being sent in 1894 to Portugal, where she was named superior of the Good Shepherd house in Porto. In that office she directed the community’s work of shelter and reform while imposing on herself a demanding routine of prayer. A chronic spinal ailment, which grew steadily worse, left her in severe pain and eventually bedridden, yet she continued to govern the convent from her sickroom.

During her years in Porto she reported repeated mystical experiences in which Christ asked that the pope consecrate the whole world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She wrote to Pope Leo XIII to convey this request, and her letters, together with supporting testimony from church officials, reached the pontiff. Leo XIII responded with the encyclical Annum Sacrum of 25 May 1899, announcing a solemn consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart. The act of consecration was performed on 11 June 1899. Sister Mary of the Divine Heart died in Porto on 8 June 1899, at the age of thirty-five, a few days before the ceremony she had so urgently sought.

After her death, a reputation for holiness spread, particularly in Portugal and among devotees of the Sacred Heart. Her remains were later enshrined in the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Ermesinde, in the district of Porto, where the body has been exposed for veneration and is described as incorrupt. The cause for her beatification proceeded in the twentieth century, and Pope Paul VI beatified her on 1 November 1975. Her liturgical commemoration is kept on 8 June. She remains a blessed of the Catholic Church and has not been canonized. Historians of devotion regard her correspondence with Leo XIII as an important immediate occasion for the 1899 consecration, which itself became a reference point for later papal acts of dedication to the Sacred Heart.