Rosa Flesch

Margaretha Flesch, known in religion as Maria Rosa Flesch, was born on 24 February 1826 in Schönstatt, a village near Vallendar in the Rhineland, then in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia. She came from a poor Catholic household and, after the death of her father while she was still young, helped support her mother and siblings through domestic service and other hard labor. Those early years of poverty and of practical care for dependents formed the background to her later work among the sick and the destitute in the Wied valley.

In the mid-nineteenth century she settled at Waldbreitbach, where she nursed the poor, the elderly, and people without family support. Other women joined her. In 1863 she founded a community that became the Franciscan Sisters of the Blessed Virgin Mary of the Angels (the Waldbreitbach Franciscans), taking the religious name Maria Rosa. The sisters followed a Franciscan life that joined prayer to active works of mercy and established houses for the care of the sick and the aged. The congregation took shape during a difficult period for the Catholic Church in Prussia, including the Kulturkampf, yet its charitable institutions continued to function.

Mother Rosa served as superior of the new congregation for a number of years. In 1878 she was not re-elected and thereafter lived as an ordinary sister, accepting the change and continuing humble service without office. She died at Waldbreitbach on 25 March 1906. The community she had founded survived her and later spread beyond its original region.

A cause for her beatification was introduced in the twentieth century. She was beatified on 4 May 2008 at a ceremony in Trier, with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI. She is venerated in the Catholic Church as Blessed Maria Rosa Flesch, foundress of the Waldbreitbach Franciscan Sisters.