RELIGION: Saint Mary Elizabeth Hesselblad

07/18/2016 | 7:42 0 Posted in Miscs, The World

Six centuries later, Sweden has another Saint.

Every religion has been made with the purpose of teaching its followers and their families the qualities that, when inculcated in their disciples, make then good human beings because these teachings have been seen as good and needed in good human beings as per the wisdom of the community or religious leaders.

These teachings also lay down the virtues that a good person needs to have to be a person worthy of approval by the community at large because the basic purpose of all these virtues as espoused by religious scriptures and learned saints are another form of discipline.

That would lead us to the common belief that the purpose of religion is to discipline a being into following a certain discipline in his life and pass it on to his future generations.

Mary Elizabeth Hesselblad is also one such person who has been brought up to follow the tenets that led to making her the person who was disciplined enough to be gifted with sainthood by the Pope himself.

She is one saintly person who just used her virtues when she needed to utilize them because, it would seem to be from the circumstances that led to the incident that brought out her best and noble side, she used the discipline that her religion inculcated in her to stand up and be counted for some people whom ordinary mortals of her own faith would have simply condemned to die at the hands of her own people.

Because life is precious and it is our duty to preserve it, the details of the persons being saved are not important; that is exactly what Hesselblad did, she rose above narrow considerations to save people who were abhorred by people of her faith.

In her convent in Rome, she saved the lives of a number of Jews by hiding them in her convent to shelter them from people who wanted to kill them; the hatred for this race was at its height and was fed by the happenings during that period.

The only previous saint that hails from Sweden is Bridget of Sweden who lived in the 14^th century and was a saint and mystic who was also famous as Saint Birgitta while the locals referred to her as den heliga birgitta.

Now, it is the turn of Hesselblad after more than 600 years; she was born a Lutheran but converted to Catholicism and is also a former nurse. The awesome event that earned her the sainthood was the act of sheltering about 12 Jews for more than a period of six months till the war came to an end; she was the mother superior of that convent.

Early life

Saint Maria Elizabeth Hesselblad was born on 4^th June 1870 in Vastra Gotaland County’s Faglavik village to Augusto Hessleblad and Cajsa Dag and was fifth in a line of thirteen children; consequently, they had to be struggling throughout to make both ends meet.

The penurious condition also forced the family to move repeatedly hence there were many disturbances to her studies as a child. Her baptism was performed in her parish that was called Hundene making her a Lutheran according to their following.

The economic situation was a constant tussle and she had to come to the aid of her parents by the age of sixteen; her first jobs were in Karlosborg but they soon moved to the United States in 1988 where she continued doing odd jobs.

After some time, she went to the Roosevelt Hospital to take up nursing while continuing to perform private jobs of home-nursing since the economic situation was still unstable.

In that period, she developed a deep interest in the Roman Catholic faith which she learnt bits and pieces of from the sick and the infirm that she took care of; even at the same time, she was learning the finer points of this religion and continued her study of the Catholic faith.