Therese von Wüllenweber

Maria Therese von Wüllenweber was born on 19 February 1833 at Castle Myllendonk, near Mönchengladbach in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia. She was the eldest daughter of a Catholic noble family headed by Baron Theodore von Wüllenweber and was raised in an environment of relative privilege together with serious religious practice. From childhood she felt drawn to a life of prayer and to missionary service in the Church. The conventions of her social class made an immediate and lasting entry into religious life difficult, and her early adulthood was marked by a prolonged search for a form of consecration that would satisfy both her contemplative leanings and her apostolic zeal.

In the 1850s and the following decades she repeatedly attempted to join existing religious congregations. Periods spent with communities in the Low Countries and elsewhere were interrupted by ill health and by the sense that those institutes did not fully correspond to the missionary vocation she believed she had received. For a time she lived a dedicated life in her native Rhineland, associating herself with Franciscan spirituality as a tertiary and engaging in works of charity, while continuing to look for a more stable and missionary-oriented foundation. Her perseverance through these years of uncertainty is a consistent feature of the sources that describe her.

The course of her life changed when she came into contact with Father Francis Mary of the Cross Jordan, founder of the Society of the Divine Savior. Jordan was then organizing an apostolic congregation of priests and brothers in Rome and wished to establish a corresponding community of women. Therese placed her person and her resources at the service of this project. On 8 December 1888 the Congregation of the Sisters of the Divine Savior was begun at Tivoli, near Rome. She received the religious name Maria of the Apostles and was appointed the first superior of the new institute. The congregation devoted itself to making the Savior known by all ways and means which the love of Christ inspires, through education, pastoral work, and missions.

As superior general she guided the young community through its first decades, forming its spirit and expanding its works despite material poverty and the ordinary trials of a new foundation. She remained in office until her death in Rome on 25 December 1907. The cause for her beatification was undertaken by the Salvatorians, and she was beatified by Pope Paul VI on 13 October 1968. In the Catholic Church she is venerated as Blessed Maria of the Apostles. Her life is remembered especially among the Salvatorian family as that of a co-foundress who united an aristocratic background, personal austerity, and a determined missionary outlook.