Blessed Josaphata Hordashevska: Co-Foundress of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church • Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate • Lviv, Ukraine • 1869–1919
Blessed Josaphata Hordashevska
Co-foundress of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate — the first active apostolic congregation in the Byzantine-Ukrainian Catholic Church — who served Ukraine's poorest before Mother Teresa was born, endured calumny and humiliation with extraordinary patience, and died at forty-nine in agony from bone tuberculosis, certain of God's mercy.
At a Glance
- Born
- November 20, 1869 — Lviv, Ukraine (then Lemberg, Austro-Hungarian Empire)
- Died
- April 7, 1919 — Krystynopil (now Chervonohrad), Ukraine (age 49)
- Birth Name
- Michaelina (Mykhailyna) Hordashevska
- Religious Name
- Sister Josaphata, SSMI — in honor of St. Josaphat Kuntsevych
- Order Founded
- Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate (SSMI) — first active apostolic congregation for women in the Byzantine-Ukrainian Catholic Church
- Church
- Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (Byzantine rite)
- Feast Day
- November 20 (birthday); 7th of every month celebrated by SSMI sisters worldwide
- Venerable
- April 6, 1998 — Pope John Paul II, Rome
- Beatified
- June 27, 2001 — Pope John Paul II, Lviv, Ukraine (over 1 million present)
- Relics
- Chapel of SSMI Generalate, Rome; first-class relic at SSMI Provincial Home, Toronto
- Canonization Status
- One miracle still required — active investigation ongoing in Manitoba, Canada
- Patron
- The poor; educators; those suffering unjust humiliation; Ukrainian Catholics
In the late nineteenth century, the Ukrainian people of Galicia — then under the dominion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — were, in the words of those who served them, "poor and neglected, spiritually, culturally and morally." They were a peasant people under foreign rule, without adequate schools, without adequate medical care, without the basic social infrastructure that the industrializing West was beginning to take for granted. Their priests needed support. Their children needed education. Their sick needed care. Their churches needed restoration. And there was, until 1892, no active religious congregation of women in the entire Byzantine-Ukrainian Catholic Church to provide any of it.
Michaelina Hordashevska changed that. At twenty-two years old, she became the first member of the first active apostolic women's congregation in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — taking the religious name Josaphata, in honor of the great Ukrainian martyr for Christian unity. She built from nothing: no traditions to guide her, no model to follow, no resources to draw on beyond the extraordinary charity and practical intelligence God gave her. By the time she died at forty-nine, wracked by the agony of bone tuberculosis, her congregation had more than fifty foundations stretching from Ukraine to Canada to Brazil, and had become the largest female religious community in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on June 27, 2001, in Lviv — the city of her birth — before an assembly of over one million faithful. She awaits one more miracle for canonization. This is the full account of her life.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church: Josaphata's Spiritual World
To understand Josaphata Hordashevska, one must understand the church that formed her — a church with one of the most remarkable and painful histories in all of Eastern Christianity.
Roots in Kyivan Rus' (988 AD)
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) traces its Christian origins to 988 AD, when Prince Volodymyr the Great officially established Byzantine Christianity as the faith of Kyivan Rus' — the vast medieval kingdom centered on present-day Kyiv. At that moment, before the Great Schism of 1054 had formally divided East and West, the Kyivan Church was baptized into a Christianity that was simultaneously Catholic in communion with Rome and Byzantine in liturgy, spirituality, and theology. It used the Byzantine rite — the same liturgical tradition as the Greek Orthodox Church — but remained in full ecclesial communion with the Latin West.
After the Schism, the Kyivan Church followed Constantinople into what became the Orthodox world. Centuries later, following prolonged theological dialogue and intense political pressure, a significant portion of the Ukrainian hierarchs signed the Union of Brest in 1596, re-entering communion with Rome while explicitly preserving their Byzantine liturgy, married clergy, and Eastern theological tradition. This is the origin of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as it exists today: Byzantine in liturgy and spirituality, Catholic in communion with the Pope.
A Church Under Pressure
By the nineteenth century, the UGCC in Galicia was living under Austro-Hungarian rule — a relative improvement over the brutal suppression it would later face under Soviet occupation, but still a condition of significant vulnerability. The Ukrainian faithful were largely poor peasants. The clergy were often isolated and under-resourced. The educated classes were dominated by Polish Roman Catholic culture, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic identity was associated with poverty and marginality. There were no active women's religious congregations to serve the people's social needs. When Josaphata founded the Sisters Servants in 1892, she was filling a void that had existed for centuries in the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
The Byzantine Rite That Formed Josaphata
The liturgical world Josaphata inhabited was the Byzantine Divine Liturgy — in the Ukrainian tradition, celebrated in Church Slavonic (and later Ukrainian), with the rich iconography, choral tradition, and liturgical calendar of the Eastern Church. The Theotokos (the Virgin Mary as God-bearer) occupied a central place in this tradition — which is why the congregation Josaphata co-founded took Mary Immaculate as its patroness, and why her blue habit honored the Blessed Mother. The Byzantine tradition's understanding of the Incarnation, of theosis, of the human person as icon of God, and of the poor as the living presence of Christ — all formed the theological framework within which Josaphata's social mission made sense.
Part II
Early Life in Lviv (1869–1887)
Michaelina Hordashevska was born on November 20, 1869, in Lviv — then called Lemberg under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the cultural capital of western Ukraine. Her family were members of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and from her earliest years she absorbed the Byzantine liturgical tradition of that ancient community.
From childhood she showed signs of exceptional piety. With her older sister Anna she would imitate hermits — eating the roots of plants as a form of ascetical practice. She would slip away to a chapel in a nearby forest to pray alone. These were not the affectations of a pious child performing religiosity for approval; they were the spontaneous expressions of an interior life already oriented toward God with unusual directness. She was a child who found God more compelling than the considerable material comfort her family provided, and who acted on that finding.
In 1887, at the age of eighteen, Michaelina made a retreat that would set the course of her entire life. The retreat was preached by a Basilian monk — Fr. Jeremiah Lomnytskyj, OSBM — whose spiritual power left a deep impression on her. During the retreat she experienced what she later described as a profound spiritual illumination: a decisive conviction that she was called to consecrate herself entirely to God. She sought out Fr. Jeremiah as her spiritual director, and with his permission, made a private vow of chastity for one year in May 1889. She would renew this vow in May 1890, and again for three years in 1891.
At eighteen, her plan was to enter a cloistered Basilian monastery — the only option available to a Ukrainian Catholic woman who wanted to lead a consecrated life. God, and Fr. Jeremiah, had other plans.
Part III
A Vocation Redirected: From Cloister to Active Life (1887–1892)
Fr. Jeremiah Lomnytskyj had been giving missions across Galicia for years, and at each mission the same painful absence struck him: when the mission ended and the priests departed, there was no one to continue the spiritual and social work among the people. Polish Roman Catholic orders were doing remarkable things for their communities. The Ukrainians had nothing comparable.
On one of his missions, in the parish of Zhuzhel, something unexpected happened. The retiring pastor, Fr. Kyrylo Seletskyj, brought to him seven young women from within the parish who wanted to enter religious life. But the only option for them was the cloistered Basilian sisters — a contemplative order unsuited to the active social ministry the people desperately needed. One of the women asked the question that Fr. Jeremiah would describe as a sign from God: "And if a poor girl wants to serve God, there is no place for her?"
Fr. Jeremiah understood. He and Fr. Seletskyj would found a new, active apostolic congregation for the Ukrainian church. And the woman he had in mind to lead it was Michaelina Hordashevska.
The Formation Period
Michaelina agreed — much as the Blessed Mother had agreed, she was told, saying: "I am a servant of the Lord; I am ready to serve where I am needed." Her yes was not enthusiastic in the human sense; it was a deliberate act of spiritual consent to a calling she had not chosen but which she recognized as God's. To prepare her, Fr. Jeremiah sent her in June 1892 to the Polish Felician Sisters in Zhovkva to observe and learn the life of an active apostolic religious community. The Felicians were so impressed with her that they would have liked her to stay permanently and join them. Michaelina declined. She understood clearly: belonging to a Polish congregation would distance her from her Ukrainian people, wounded by poverty, political oppression, and neglect. Her mission was to them.
After two months, she returned to Lviv. She designed and sewed her own habit — blue, in honor of the Blessed Mother — and on August 24, 1892, she was vested in it, taking the religious name Josaphata, in honor of Saint Josaphat Kuntsevych: the great Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archbishop of Polotsk who had been martyred in 1623 for the cause of Christian unity and was canonized in 1867. The name was not incidental. It placed the new congregation's mission in explicit continuity with the tradition of saints who had given their lives for the unity and holiness of the Ukrainian church.
Founding the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate (1892)
On August 27, 1892, in the humble village of Zhuzhel, the Congregation of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate (SSMI) was officially founded. Sister Josaphata, just twenty-two years old, was its first member, first superior, and formation directress. The seven young women from Zhuzhel were her first postulants.
Their first evening together was remembered by all who were there as something extraordinary. The table was lit by a single candle borrowed from the sacristy. The pastor's sister brought them pieces of chicken and a loaf of bread. Josaphata reverently took the loaf of bread, raised it to heaven, and broke it into pieces for each of them. Those present said they were all reminded of the Last Supper — of Christ distributing the life-giving bread to His first followers. Everyone said they had never felt such peace and joy as that evening. They began their life of prayer and service with almost nothing: a borrowed candle, a loaf of bread, and an absolute conviction that God had called them here.
Their commitment was stated simply: "to educate and ennoble the heart of the people, and to serve where the need is greatest." This became their charism — as alive today as it was in that candlelit room in Zhuzhel in 1892.
Before 1892, a Ukrainian Catholic woman who wished to consecrate her life to God had only one option: the cloistered Basilian nuns, a contemplative order with no active social mission among the people. There were no teaching sisters, no nursing sisters, no parish ministry sisters of Ukrainian Catholic identity.
What Josaphata co-founded in 1892 was not merely a new congregation — it was the creation of an entirely new category of religious life within the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church: the active apostolic woman religious, consecrated to God and to the service of the poor.
The SSMI grew to become the largest female religious community in the entire Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — a direct consequence of the founding vision that Josaphata brought to life in Zhuzhel.
Part V
The Mission: Serving Where the Need Is Greatest
From the first months of the congregation's existence, Josaphata and the Sisters Servants threw themselves into the full range of human need they found around them. They had no manual, no institutional tradition, no endowment. They had their charism, their prayer, their practical intelligence, and their willingness to go wherever the suffering was worst.
Education for All
In a region where illiteracy was endemic among the poor, the Sisters Servants opened schools and taught children to read and write in Ukrainian. They understood that education was not merely a practical benefit but a form of dignity: a Ukrainian peasant child who could read the Scriptures, could sign their name, could engage with the world as a person rather than a serf, was a child restored to the full image of God. They also taught adults — catechism to those who had never learned it properly, literacy to parents who wanted to follow what their children were studying. At a time when Polonization was suppressing Ukrainian cultural identity, teaching in the Ukrainian language was itself an act of social and spiritual resistance.
Daycare Centers and the Midday Meal
Josaphata recognized that poor parents could not work the fields if they had no one to care for their children. The Sisters Servants established daycare centers in the villages they served — places where children were safe, cared for, and received basic education while their parents labored. She also understood that hungry children cannot learn. She ensured that the children in their care were fed.
Medicine for the Poor
Living in villages without doctors or pharmacies, Josaphata studied herbal medicine and learned to compound homemade remedies for people who could not afford professional medical care. The Sisters became the closest thing many rural Ukrainian communities had to healthcare workers. They cared for the sick in their homes, visiting families in the most isolated and neglected villages. When cholera and typhus epidemics swept through Galicia, the Sisters Servants went in rather than pulling back.
The Restoration of Churches
The Sisters also worked to restore the beauty and order of village churches that had fallen into neglect — teaching communities to sew liturgical vestments, cleaning and repairing sanctuaries, teaching liturgical chant to parishes that had lost the tradition. In the Byzantine understanding, the beauty of the sacred space is not an aesthetic preference but a theological statement: the church building is an icon of the Kingdom, and its beauty is an act of proclamation. Josaphata understood this instinctively.
The Dying Beggar Woman
The most vivid single incident in the record of Josaphata's charity captures the entire logic of her mission. When the Sisters Servants arrived in Krystynopil, neighbors reported that a dying beggar woman had been abandoned in a barn — alone, neglected, beyond the reach of anyone's care. Sister Josaphata went to the barn, assessed the situation, and carried the woman herself to the convent. There were no extra beds. She put the dying woman in her own bed. She slept on the floor. This was not a dramatic gesture for an audience; it was simply what one does when one has understood that the poor are Christ.
Growth Across Ukraine and Beyond (1892–1909)
The congregation Josaphata co-founded grew with remarkable speed, because the need it was meeting was so acute and so visible. From the seven women of Zhuzhel in 1892, the SSMI grew to 128 sisters in 26 convents across western Ukraine by 1902 — just ten years after the founding. The growth was organic and demand-driven: wherever the Sisters went, communities recognized what they were doing and sought more of it.
In ten years, Josaphata had built from a single candle in a bare room to an international congregation. She had done it with no institutional precedent, no inherited wealth, no support from existing structures beyond the vision of two priests who had trusted a twenty-two-year-old woman to carry their dream forward.
The Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate now number approximately 700 sisters in 13 countries: Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Germany, Serbia, Kazakhstan, France, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Their generalate (motherhouse) is in Rome. Their Canadian Province, under the patronage of Christ the King, is particularly active. The SSMI-US Immaculate Conception Province serves in six ministries in the northeastern United States, including a retreat house and adult care home in Sloatsburg, New York. All of it traces to the seven women of Zhuzhel and the woman who broke bread for them by candlelight.
Part VII
The Great Trials: Humiliation, Unjust Removal, and Perpetual Vows Denied (1902–1909)
The external growth of the SSMI in its first decade concealed a growing internal crisis that would prove to be the most formidable test of Josaphata's character — and the crucible in which her sanctity was most visibly refined.
The Resignation and Its Aftermath
Following the First General Chapter of 1902, internal divisions began to surface within the congregation — conflicts that modern accounts describe carefully but do not detail fully. Some priests and sisters were unable to accept that a woman could govern a congregation with the authority required. Lies were told about Josaphata. Opposition grew from both laity and clergy. Eventually, a situation developed that led Josaphata to tender her resignation as Superior General to Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, the Archbishop of Lviv.
Under the new superior general appointed by the Metropolitan, something remarkable and troubling happened: Josaphata and her natural sister, Sister Arsenia Hordashevska, were both denied permission to pronounce their perpetual vows — for two consecutive years. The woman who had co-founded the congregation seventeen years earlier could not make her final, lifelong profession of religious vows. Without perpetual vows, she was canonically ineligible to participate in the Second General Chapter of the congregation she had built.
She was also sent to the most difficult missions — the poorest, most isolated, most demanding postings available. This was not compassionate assignment but punitive placement. She accepted every posting without complaint.
The Vindication of May 1909
At the Second General Chapter in May 1909, the delegates — seeing clearly what had been done to their foundress — acted with decisive courage: they elected Josaphata General Vicaress in absentia and petitioned the Metropolitan for permission for her to pronounce her perpetual vows. On May 10, 1909, she was elected to the post. On May 11, 1909, seventeen years after she had co-founded the congregation, Sister Josaphata of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate finally pronounced her perpetual vows.
The records do not indicate that she expressed bitterness about the preceding years. She had served in the most difficult missions. She had been lied about. She had been excluded from the governance of the congregation she had founded. She had confronted all of it with prayer. The SSMI accounts of this period describe a woman who found in every humiliation a deepening of her union with the Christ who had been unjustly accused, stripped of authority, and sent to the most difficult of all possible missions — the Cross.
Part VIII
Her Spirituality: Marian Servant, Patient Sufferer
Josaphata's spirituality cannot be easily separated from her action. She was not a contemplative who occasionally emerged to do good works; she was an apostolic woman whose entire active life was sustained by and expressed in prayer. The two were inseparable for her, as they have been for the great Byzantine saints of the active tradition.
Marian Consecration in the Byzantine Tradition
The SSMI congregation she co-founded took the Immaculate Mary as its patroness, and the blue habit Josaphata designed was a deliberate act of Marian consecration. In the Byzantine theological tradition, the Theotokos — the one who bears God — is not merely an intercessor but the supreme model of human openness to the Incarnation. Mary's fiat is the paradigm of all Christian response to God: "I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word." Josaphata's own response to the unexpected apostolic vocation she was given — "I am ready to serve where I am needed" — echoes this Marian pattern deliberately.
Throughout the humiliations of the middle years of her religious life, she turned consistently to the Blessed Mother. Her sisters report that she spoke of Mary as a refuge and a guide, and that her own composure under unjust treatment was attributed by those who knew her to the depth of her Marian consecration.
The Poor as Icons of Christ
In the Byzantine theological tradition, the icon is not merely a representation but a presence: an image that makes present what it depicts. When Josaphata carried the dying beggar woman to her own bed, she was acting on a theology of the poor that is deeply Byzantine: the poor are living icons of Christ's kenosis, His self-emptying. To serve them is to serve Him. To ignore them is to ignore Him. This conviction — held not as abstract doctrine but as practical operational truth — drove everything she built.
Suffering Accepted as Formation
The record of her seventeen years of humiliation — denied vows, sent to the hardest missions, lied about by those she had formed — is a sustained lesson in what the Eastern spiritual tradition calls nepsis: watchful sobriety, the refusal to be driven by wounded pride or resentment. She did not resist the humiliations through stoic indifference. She accepted them actively, offered them to God, and found in them the specific formation her soul required. Her cause was vindicated in her lifetime; but she seems to have been at peace before the vindication came.
Final Years and Holy Death (1909–1919)
After her vindication and the pronouncement of her perpetual vows in May 1909, Josaphata continued her active apostolate in the service of the congregation. The years that followed, however, were shadowed by progressive physical deterioration.
Three years after her perpetual profession, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone — a condition of exceptional cruelty, producing chronic, escalating pain in the affected skeletal structures that could only worsen with time. The disease was at that period largely untreatable. There would be no remission, no cure, no management beyond partial relief of pain. The woman who had spent her life serving those in physical suffering now entered it herself, fully, permanently, and with increasing intensity.
The First World War (1914–1918) brought further devastation to Galicia. The region became a battlefield, occupied and re-occupied by multiple armies. The work of the SSMI continued under wartime conditions. Josaphata, increasingly debilitated by her illness, remained in Krystynopil — now called Chervonohrad — where she died on April 7, 1919, at the age of forty-nine.
She had predicted the day of her death. Her sisters gathered. She died with fifty-plus foundations bearing her congregation's charism, a congregation that had spread from Galicia to Canada to Croatia to Brazil — built by a woman who had been denied her permanent vows until seventeen years into her religious life, who had been sent to the hardest missions as punishment, and who had confronted every difficulty with prayer.
Her last words, as recorded by those present, expressed what the whole of her life had been: a surrender, complete and peaceful, to the God she had served without reservation.
She was buried at Krystynopil. In November 1982, her mortal remains were exhumed and transferred to Rome, where they rest today in a reliquary in the chapel of the Generalate of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate.
Part X
Intercessions and Reported Miracles
Reports of miraculous favor through Josaphata's intercession began in the years following her death and multiplied over the decades as her reputation for holiness spread through the Ukrainian Catholic diaspora.
- The Beatification Miracle (approved April 24, 2001): On April 24, 2001, in the Clementine Hall at the Vatican, the decree recognizing a miracle through the intercession of Venerable Sister Josaphata was promulgated by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. This miracle was examined by the standard Vatican medical and theological commissions and found to be beyond natural explanation. Its approval cleared the way for beatification. The specific nature of the miracle is documented in the cause proceedings; the Vatican's approval was announced with the decree on that date, just two months before the beatification ceremony in Lviv.
- Ongoing Reports After Beatification: Following her beatification in 2001, reports of answered prayers and miraculous favors through Josaphata's intercession continued to pour into the SSMI Generalate in Rome. The congregation documents and reviews these regularly as part of the ongoing canonization cause.
- The Manitoba Investigation: The Metropolitan of Winnipeg, Lawrence Huculak, accepted a formal request from SSMI Postulator Sr. Luiza Ciupa, based in Rome, to investigate an alleged miracle that occurred within the Archeparchy of Winnipeg through Josaphata's intercession. The Metropolitan issued a formal decree accepting the investigation, noting that "not only has Blessed Josaphata's life provided inspiration to all followers of Christ, but many throughout the world have found solace by their prayer and devotions to this holy woman." The outcome of this investigation could provide the one remaining miracle needed for canonization.
Those who have experienced what they believe to be a miraculous answer to prayer through the intercession of Blessed Josaphata are encouraged to report it to the Postulator of her canonization cause: Sr. Luiza Ciupa, SSMI, Via Cassia Antica 104, 00191 Roma, Italia. The SSMI congregation and the Church depend on these reports to advance the process toward her canonization. Documentation of the health situation before and after, medical records, and witness testimony are all helpful.
Part XI
Path to Beatification (1982–2001)
The beatification ceremony in Lviv was a moment of extraordinary significance for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The UGCC had been banned, forced underground, and brutally suppressed by Soviet authorities from 1946 to 1989. Its priests had been imprisoned, deported to Siberia, tortured, and killed. Its faithful had practiced their faith in secret, at enormous personal risk, for over forty years. When Pope John Paul II — himself a son of a nation that knew totalitarian oppression — stood in Lviv and proclaimed Michaelina Hordashevska a Blessed of the universal Church, he was doing so before a million people who understood what it meant to suffer for faith without recanting it.
Josaphata's feast day was officially assigned as November 20 — the date of her birth — rather than April 7, the date of her death, since April 7 coincides with the major Byzantine feast of the Annunciation of the Mother of God on the Julian Calendar. SSMI sisters worldwide also celebrate smaller "Josaphata Days" on the seventh of every month — a practice begun in anticipation of her beatification and continued as an act of gratitude and ongoing intercession.
Where to Venerate Her Relics and Pray for Canonization
Blessed Josaphata's mortal remains are primarily in Rome, with portions in Ukraine and a first-class relic available for veneration in Canada. The SSMI congregation, active in thirteen countries, is the primary community keeping her memory and intercession alive worldwide.
| Location | Details | Contact / Website |
|---|---|---|
| SSMI Generalate Chapel, Rome, Italy | Primary location of Josaphata's mortal remains, transferred from Ukraine in November 1982. Held in a reliquary in the chapel of the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate Generalate. Address: Via Cassia Antica 104, 00191 Roma. | ssmi.org |
| SSMI Provincial Home, Toronto, Ontario, Canada | First-class relic — a portion of bone — available for veneration at the Provincial Home of the Sisters Servants in Toronto. Contact the Canadian Province for details. | ssmi.org/our-community |
| Monastery, Pasichna Street, Lviv, Ukraine | Small portions of the relics remain in Lviv, preserved at a monastery on Pasichna Street. Contact the local UGCC bishop or SSMI for current access information. | Contact UGCC Lviv Archeparchy |
| SSMI-US Immaculate Conception Province, Sloatsburg, New York | The US province of SSMI operates a retreat house, adult care home, and vestment ministry at Sloatsburg, NY. Contact for information on Josaphata devotion and relic access in the US. | ssmi-us.org |
| Holy Eucharist Cathedral, New Westminster, BC, Canada | The Eparchy of New Westminster has hosted the icon of Blessed Josaphata for veneration. Contact the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy for current schedule. | nweparchy.ca |
| Ukrainian Catholic Eparchies Worldwide | UGCC eparchies in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and elsewhere may hold relics or host icon veneration. Contact your local Ukrainian Catholic eparchy for information. | Contact local UGCC eparchy |
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Questions About Blessed Josaphata Hordashevska
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Serve Where the Need Is Greatest
Michaelina Hordashevska chose to be called Josaphata — after a martyr who gave his life for unity. She took the name and lived it: building unity where there was division, bringing education where there was ignorance, carrying medicine where there was illness, lifting the dying from barns and placing them in her own bed. She did it in one of the most difficult political and ecclesiastical environments of nineteenth-century Europe, under foreign domination, through internal betrayal, through seventeen years without her permanent vows, through the slow agony of bone tuberculosis. She did it until the day she died, forty-nine years old, with over fifty foundations bearing the charism she had brought to life by candlelight in a bare room in Zhuzhel.
She awaits one more miracle for the Church to declare her a saint. In the meantime, she intercedes. Pray to her. Report miracles. Ask her to serve where the need is greatest — which is, as she knew, everywhere.
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