Ursula Ledóchowska

Saint Ursula Ledóchowska
Saint Ursula, 1907
Religious and foundress
Born	17 April 1865 Loosdorf, Lower Austria, Austrian Empire
Died	29 May 1939 (aged 74) Rome, Italy
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church (Congregation of the Ursulines of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus)
Beatified	20 June 1983, Poznań, Poland, by Pope John Paul II
Canonized	18 May 2003, Vatican City, by Pope John Paul II
Feast	29 May

Ursula Maria Ledóchowska, USAHJ (17 April 1865 – 29 May 1939) was a Polish Catholic Religious Sister, who founded the Congregation of the Ursulines of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus. She was a member of the prominent Ledóchowski family. She has been declared a saint by the Catholic Church.

She was born Julia Maria Ledóchowska on 17 April 1865 in Loosdorf, Lower Austria, to Count Antoni Halka-Ledóchowski, whose ancestors lived in eastern Poland, and his second wife, Countess Josephine Salis-Zizers, a descendant of an old Swiss aristocratic family. She was the fifth child of a family with finally ten children.Cardinal Mieczysław Halka-Ledóchowski was a paternal uncle.

Due to financial reverses, in 1874 the family moved to Sankt Poelten, where she and her sister attended a grammar school run by the Religious Sisters of Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, commonly known as the Sisters of Loreto. In 1882, her father acquired an estate in Lipnica Murowana near Tarnów (then in Galicia, Austrian Lesser Poland) and in 1883 the family moved there. The count died in February 1885 due to smallpox. The siblings' uncle, Cardinal Ledóchowski, assumed responsibility for them.

On 18 August 1886, Julia Maria entered the novitiate of the Ursulines of Kraków. The next year she received the religious habit and was given the religious name Ursula Maria. In 1904, she was elected as Mother Superior of the monastery. In Kraków she opened a home for female university students. At that time, that was a new phenomenon. With a special blessing of Pope Pius X, she went to St. Petersburg in Russia, where she worked to build up St. Catharine House, which was a residence for Roman Catholic Polish youth living there. She wore civil clothes, because Roman Catholic institutions were illegal in the Russian Empire. As the tsarist government oppression to Catholics grew, she moved to Russian-controlled Finland, where she translated prayers and songs for Finnish fishermen, who usually were Protestants. In 1914, she finally was expelled from the empire.