Mother Magdalen Damen

Catherine Damen was born in a small town in the southern Netherlands in 1787.  When she was a teenager, she began studying with the secular Franciscans, a group of lay people who took vows to serve God and his people.  Upon taking the secular vows herself, Catherine declared it “the happiest day of my life.”

Catherine lived with three other secular Franciscans and together they ministered to the sick and the poor.  When a pastor in the town of Heythuysen learned of the women, he asked them to begin ministry in his town.  Only Catherine chose to relocate.  Upon seeing her arrive alone and believing her the least capable, the pastor complained, “They might just as well have kept her.”  Undaunted, Catherine soon began teaching basic literacy and simple religious instruction to the unsupervised street children of Heythuysen.

As other women joined Catherine, she proposed they begin a religious congregation.  Again, the pastor doubted Catherine, believing that she and her small group of secular Franciscans were too few, too old, unskilled and uneducated.  Working diligently, Catherine and her small group accomplished the tasks needed to become a religious congregation in the Catholic Church.  As each became sisters and took new names, Catherine chose Magdalen and became head of the new order, thereby founding the Sisters of St. Francis of Penance and Christian Charity.

As the congregation grew, it spread throughout the southern Netherlands and into Germany.  In the 1870s, the German government began a systematic persecution of Catholics and as a result, many immigrated to the United States to practice their religion freely.  Priests and sisters followed to serve the immigrants.  In 1874, four Sisters of St. Francis of Penance and Christian Charity, the order founded by Mother Magdalen Damen, arrived in Buffalo, New York and established their first American motherhouse and novitiate in the Diocese of Buffalo.

This good work is not my doing.  I am quite unable to carry out such a thing or even to think it through.  It is God who inspired me with this thought.
This is God’s work and God will provide.
— Mother Magdalen Damen