Pilgrims of Hope (7): Brothers and Sisters

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 July: Hope for Brothers and Sisters.

25.07.25. In 2018, a headline from the UK attracted a lot of attention: the world’s first “Ministry for Loneliness” was established in the United Kingdom. Two years later, Japan followed suit. In October 2023, an international study covering 140 countries found that almost one in four people worldwide suffers from loneliness. At almost the same time, the German government developed a “strategy against loneliness” and recently presented its latest “loneliness barometer,” which analyzes the experience of loneliness among the German population every year and states a rising trend.

Everyone agrees that loneliness is a major problem of our time, as loneliness not only weighs on the soul, but also on the body. Its toxic effect is said to be equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes every day. Some studies even point to a threat to democracy, as lonely people show significantly less trust in political institutions and a stronger tendency toward extremism.

People who experience exclusion and discrimination have always been particularly affected by loneliness. During the lifetime of St. Francis of Assisi, it was lepers who were banished from the city gates and left to their fate. The Franciscan chronicles report that a personal encounter with a leper changed Francis’ life: The rich, spoiled young man dismounted from his horse and embraced the sick man, in whom he recognized his brother, in whom he recognized Jesus. Later, Francis and his companions dedicated their lives to these very sick and marginalized people, and included all of creation in their brotherly care. This is also evidenced by the “Canticle of the Sun,” which Francis wrote 800 years ago. In it, he refers to all fellow creatures, as well as the sun, moon, and the elements, as his brothers and sisters.

Since the founding of our Congregation in 1844, inspired by the example of St. Francis, we Hospital Sisters have always tried to live this kind of “brotherhood” or “sisterhood” in our service to God and humanity. In the early 1990s, this attitude led Sister M. Juvenalis Lammers and me to Berlin. It was a time when HIV, then a new virus, was spreading fear and terror, and infection was tantamount to a death sentence. Within Germany, a particularly large number of infected people lived and died in the capital, lonely and marginalized like “new lepers,” rejected by society, by the Church, and some even by their own families.

In November 1992, with the approval of our Congregation’s leadership in Münster, we moved to Berlin-Pankow, a district in the former East Germany. As trained nurses, we worked for four years in clinics and outpatient care to gain experience in treating AIDS patients. It quickly became clear to us that there was a gap in the care for these patients, especially in accompanying tose dying with AIDS. To fill this gap, we founded the outpatient hospice service “Hospizdienst Tauwerk e.V.” in 1997 together with like-minded people.

Since then, with the help specially trained volunteers and Sister M. Margret Steggemann, who joined us in Berlin in 2009, we have accompanied more than 500 AIDS patients till their death, offering them acceptance, interest, dialogue, and solidarity instead of loneliness and exclusion. We are delighted to be able to continue this commitment to people with AIDS under the umbrella of the Caritas Association for the Archdiocese of Berlin, starting this year.

St. Francis did not need international studies to know that the best medicine for loneliness is social contact and good relationships. In accompanying the dying, we too have repeatedly felt how much comfort there is in simply having someone there—when, instead of exclusion, a healing bond becomes palpable because we encounter each other as human beings, as brothers and sisters. Not only in sickness and in death, but also in the midst of our life; not only in Assisi and Berlin, but everywhere. And if, statistically speaking, one in four people is lonely, then, in very practical terms, there is lots to do for each and every one of us, wherever we are.

By Sister M. Hannelore Huesmann and Claudia Berghorn
Photos: private

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

Further information on the Hospice Service in Berlin can be found in the following video, which was created in 2022 in co-operation with St. Francis Foundation and the German Province of our Congregation.