Chicagoland

Sisters have been serving Chicago’s needy for 130 years

By Michelle Martin | Staff writer
Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Sisters have been serving Chicago’s needy for 130 years

A hundred and thirty years ago, a young Polish woman from Chicago started a religious community to help the mostly elderly people she saw suffering in her community.
Franciscan Sister Anne Marie Knawa plays baseball with boys at St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr School in this undated photo. (Photo courtesy of the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago)
Franciscan sisters and a doctor surround newborn babies at Gregory Community Hospital in Gregory, South Dakota, in this undated photo. (Photo courtesy of the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago)

A hundred and thirty years ago, a young Polish woman from Chicago started a religious community to help the mostly elderly people she saw suffering in her community.

Now, the 15 remaining Franciscan Sisters of Chicago sponsor Franciscan Ministries, which operates eight independent and assisted living and skilled nursing facilities across the Chicago area, northwest Indiana and Ohio.

“Some people might think all we’ve done is elder care,” said Sister Jeanne Marie Toriskie, the community’s vicar general. “Most people are shocked to know that Father Flanagan invited our sisters to work in Boys Town [the home for at-risk young people in Nebraska]. We did religious education and we were like house mothers there; we did sewing and domestic work.”

Sister Jeanne Marie works with the general minister, Sister M. Bernadette Bajuscik, and the general councilor, Sister M. Helene Galuszka, on the congregation’s leadership council.

The Franciscan Sisters of Chicago also have the Madonna Foundation, which provides scholarship support to 71 students at Catholic girls high schools, and St. Jude House, a shelter for survivors of domestic violence. Since 1963, the motherhouse has been located in Lemont.

The sisters — then known as the Franciscan Sister of Blessed Kunegunda — served at Boys Town in Nebraska from 1940 to 1976. Members of the congregation, which at one time numbered more than 400, also ministered in South and North Dakota, Nebraska, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, the District of Columbia, Texas, Pennsylvania, as well as in India, Mexico, Canada, Germany and Poland, the birthplace of Venerable Mother Theresa Dudzik.

Of course, the founder of the congregation wasn’t venerable when it started, and no one called her “mother.”

Josephine Dudzik was born in 1860 in the village of Plocicz, in western Poland. She came to Chicago as a young adult with her parents in 1881, and the family joined St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, then the largest parish in the United States.

Five years later, she joined the secular Third Order of St. Francis, a lay group looking to deepen their spiritual lives through communion with the Franciscans. It was only a few years after that, following the death of her father, that she began trying to help people affected by a major economic downturn by taking them into her home.

“Remember that Chicago was still getting back on its feet after the big fire (in 1871),” said Sister Jeanne Marie, who has become the community’s de facto historian and leads the work on the sainthood cause of Mother Theresa.

“Because of the fire, there was a regulation in the city that you could only build in brick. We’re not a producer of brick here in Chicago. That was pricey,” Sister Jeanne Marie said. “People had no insurance on their homes that burned. People were left on the street with nothing.”

This was happening in the decades before labor laws provided any safety for workers, who could be killed on the job or maimed and cast out, and before laws prevented children from working in dangerous occupations.

“There’s all these orphan kids out there, and she was taking them in as well,” Sister Jeanne Marie said. “She was trying to help out, because people were eating out of the gutters and trash cans. People are losing limbs and getting blood poisoning, and penicillin wasn’t invented yet.”

So, as she took more people in, young Josephine asked friends from the Third Order of St. Francis to help care for them, Sister Jeanne Marie said. But that started to cause some uncharitable talk in the parish.

“These are unmarried women taking in men off the streets,” Sister Jeanne Marie said.

The pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka, Resurrectionist Father Vincent Barzynski, had a solution. She must form a community of religious sisters to keep doing the work she was doing, he told her.

It took more than a year, but that’s what she did. At its start on Dec. 8, 1894, the congregation consisted only of Dudzik — now Sister Mary Therese — and three others, although more said they would join.

 “Women said yes, and then they would step out,” Sister Jeanne Marie said. “There were three that really persevered from the very beginning.”

Within four years of its founding, and before the original sisters even professed vows, the congregation had opened what was known as St. Joseph Home for the Aged and Crippled in the Avondale neighborhood and added St. Vincent Orphanage the following year.

The sisters then started a trajectory of growth, attracting new sisters and adding new ministries, teaching in 44 grade schools and two high schools.

It was in one of those schools, St. Pancratius, that Father Thomas Bernas, an archdiocesan priest, met the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago.

Bernas is now the local vice-postulator for the Venerable Mother M. Theresa Dudzik’s sainthood cause, because, he said, he’s been with the sisters for nearly 60 years, since kindergarten.

“My faith, my vocation, everything came from my parents and the sisters,” he said.

The community eventually opened a day nursery and also worked in nursing and in the domestic sphere, providing housekeepers to, among other places, Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and domestic work, house leadership and religious education at Boys Town.

“The sisters who cooked, sewed and did other domestic work often were immigrants who came to the community with limited education but prodigious skills,” Sister Jeanne Marie said.

“They were sought after,” she said. “Cooking and baking … they were stars at it. Sewing. Everything was spotless.”

For much of the period of growth, few people remembered that Sister M. Theresa had actually founded the order.

In 1910, Barzynski, still the pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka, advised Sister M. Theresa to step aside. The community was raising money to buy a new house, according to its website, and once again, there was talk, this time that she was using some of the money for her own purposes.

Sister Jeanne Marie said the problem might have been that Sister M. Theresa was not popular with the original sisters, many of whom had been independent before joining the congregation and chafed at having to submit to a religious superior.

“They resented her pushing them to become religious,” Sister Jeanne Marie said. “They picked someone who was more easygoing.”

Sister M. Therese’s best friend, Sister M. Anna Wysinski, became superior, and Sister M. Theresa spent the remaining eight years of her life working in the garden, sewing habits and teaching young women who wanted to join the congregation the ways of being a sister.

“She wrote that she was very happy to have the burden removed from her shoulders,” Sister Jeanne Marie said. “And they forgot that she was the foundress.”

That history was rediscovered in 1940, at the community’s sixth general chapter meeting. That was when she became Mother Mary Theresa Dudzik.

Cardinal John Cody officially opened her cause for beatification in 1979. She was declared a Servant of God in 1982, and declared Venerable by Pope John Paul II in 1994.

“Hers is a story of living a life of service and dedication and working through hardships,” Bernas said. “If you look at the early history of the order, they struggled. … Her dedication to God, her not giving up. Her willingness to serve and take on many different ministries. She’s a wonderful example of a simple Chicago girl from Poland who just blossomed.”

The next step along the path would be beatification, for which a miracle must be ascribed to her intercession.

Mother M. Theresa was featured on an episode of EWTN’s “The Miracle Hunter,” now available on YouTube, and that seems to have generated more interest in her cause over the past year or so, Sister Jeanne Marie said.

“We are receiving reports of people receiving favors,” she said. “We had big help from the EWTN movie. People are telling us of alleged miracles. … If the Vatican approves a miracle, and she becomes beatified, it will happen here in Chicago, and we’re pretty pumped up about that idea. Just imagine.”

Topics:

  • women religious

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