Pilgrims of Hope (3): Healing

The series “Pilgrims of Hope” is a monthly spiritual contribution to the Holy Year – a collaboration between the international Generalate of the Hospital Sisters of St Francis and the Muenster-based German church publication “Kirche und Leben” (“Church+Life”). Our topic in March: Hope for Healing.

Fasting is trendy. This is the result of a recent survey by the German health insurance company DAK: While in 2013, around 50 percent of Germans were willing to give up alcohol, sweets or cigarettes for a while for the sake of their health, today, the number has gone up to 72 percent.

Conscious abstinence with a healing effect: This positive aspect of our pre-Easter fasting period hardly needs any explanation anymore these days. But what are the religious aspects that can also be beneficial?

Personally, I appreciate the time of Lent as an opportunity for an inner process that begins with a mindful inventory. It is important to me to pause in my tracks and ask my heart: How do I live with God and with the people, here and now? Could there be something that might need healing? – An inventory that can lead to an inner and outer realignment.

This process of reorientation, which accompanies me during Lent, also runs through the history of the Hospital Sisters of St Francis, founded in 1844 as a Congregation of nurses. At the time, this was a concrete response to social need and the lack of health care. Since then, additional fields of work have developed alongside nursing because the Sisters have always responded attentively to the signs of the times, and have asked God for guidance, as well as their hearts. So today, our international Congregation also includes high school and kindergarden teachers, social workers, doctors and lawyers.

What unites all these activities is the inner attitude of “bringing Christ’s healing presence to the people” in the footsteps of St. Francis, as outlined in our mission statement. In other words, our goal is to bring God’s love to the people – in any way that people need it right now. This also means that we are always ready to develop further – as a Congregation, but also each of us personally.

This can be a huge challenge. For example for Sister M. Gerburg Aufderheide, who went to India in 1974 and founded the first convent there. Sister Gerburg, born in the German village of Ennigerloh in 1935. As tradition required, she had learned housekeeping as a young girl, then she became a kindergarten teacher and became a nurse after entering the convent.

In India, she was able to draw on these qualifications when setting up a medical and nursing care center. What she hadn’t reckoned with was that people brought her children – babies and toddlers, found in the garbage or on train tracks, left to die, because no one wanted them. Sister Gerburg took these children in and raised them, later ensuring their education and, in due course, finding suitable marriage partners for them – tasks that would traditionally have fallen to the parents. This way, she saved 27 girls and boys.

At the same time, Sister Gerburg laid the foundations for our first convent in India, starting in 1979 with four Indian candidates. She continued to provide nursing care and also served as the housekeeper, driver and handywoman in the young community. Communicating in English and Hindi was difficult, the climate was strange, and so were the symptoms of the illnesses. “Fortunately, I liked the hot climate from the beginning,” says Sister Gerburg, who will turn 90 in the fall, “but I had to learn from scratch how to treat snakebites.”

Today, in our Indian Province, almost 100 Sisters live in 17 convents in seven federal states, and a hospital has just been opened at the very place where Sister Gerburg began her work more than 50 years ago. Sister Gerburg’s example shows me how much each and every one of us can achieve when our hearts are open to being an instrument of God’s love in our contact with people. Even if it might not be the snake bites that we have to heal, but our relationship with God and the people around us.

By Sister M. Hiltrud Vacker and Claudia Berghorn

This article was published online and in print in the Diocese of Muenster’s magazine, “Kirche+Leben” (Church+Life), in March 2025.