Auguste from Sartorius

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Auguste from Sartorius

Auguste von Sartorius (born March 1, 1830 in Aachen , † May 8, 1895 in Paris ) was a German Roman Catholic religious and superior general of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus ( French Dames du Sacré-Cœur de Jesus ).

Live and act

Auguste von Sartorius was the daughter of the doctor Georg von Sartorius (1787-1856), who came from Graz and practiced in Aachen, and his wife Therese, c. Lerodt, b. von Eynatten (1793-1882). From her mother's first marriage, Auguste had three much older half-siblings, two of whom no longer lived at home. After the older of these two sisters died suddenly in 1840, their six children, who were also Auguste's nieces and nephews, grew up with the rest of the family in the house of Georg and Therese von Sartorius. These family circumstances and the work of Augustes mother Therese on the board of the women's association, which ran the Marianneninstitut , a maternity ward for poor women who have recently given birth , shaped Auguste von Sartorius for the rest of her life. She received her schooling from private teachers, as there was no continuous higher school for girls in Aachen at the time.

Auguste von Sartorius was a well-educated and well-informed adolescent of almost 15 years of age when she found out about the misery of other children around the world. After the French bishop Charles-Auguste-Marie-Joseph de Forbin-Janson from Nancy founded the children's aid organization Oeuvre de la Sainte Enfance (German: work of holy childhood ) in 1843 to remedy this need , Augustes aimed to do the same to be implemented in Aachen. She began with friends and other children of wealthy families to collect money and donate the proceeds to the bishop. At first her engagement was ridiculed, but after her actions had got around to increasing extent, she received increasing support from family and friends as well as from the church. On February 2, 1846, she finally initiated the establishment of the German Children's Mission under the name Verein der Heilige Kindheit , which was then headed by a pastor friend and in which her father acted as treasurer, as she was not entitled to leadership roles at the age of 16. In 1856 their association was founded by Pope Pius IX. accepted. Since 1959 the association has been jointly responsible for the annual Dreikönigssingen campaign .

In 1855 Auguste von Sartorius opted for religious life and entered the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Vaals , which had established a branch in the Blumenthal Castle there in 1848 . The order, founded by Sophie Barat in 1800 and expanding worldwide, ran a boarding school for daughters of noble and wealthy families in addition to the Ignatian retreat . On March 1, 1856, Sartorius received her religious dress and, after another year of novitiate , which she had completed at the motherhouse in Paris , took her first religious vows on March 5, 1858 . In 1861 Sartorius was entrusted with the management of the boarding school in Blumenthal and on October 20, 1863 she received her perpetual profession in Paris. A year later she was appointed house superior in Blumenthal. In 1872, Sartorius was commissioned to set up a novitiate in the Marienthal monastery near Münster , which, however, did not take place, as the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and other related orders and congregations were expelled from the German Empire due to the measures taken during the Kulturkampf were. Auguste von Sartorius lodged a complaint with the President of the Province of Westphalia , Friedrich von Kühlwetter , but it was rejected. She then resumed her services at Blumenthal Castle, until in 1881 she was transferred to the "couvent du Sacré-Cœur" in Bois l'Évêque near Liège . Due to her versatile language skills, Sartorius was commissioned in 1884 to reorganize the vicariate of Louisiana as vicar superior and to support an area in Mexico belonging to the local administrative district into independence. Two years later, she was called back to the Paris headquarters, from there as Vicar General and Deputy General Adèle Lehon to look after all of the American branches.

After the superior general's death in 1894, Auguste von Sartorius was elected her successor in the first ballot. One of her first official acts was the installation of a memorial plaque on the birthplace of the founder of the order Sophie Barat in Joigny . Her tenure as Superior General lasted only ten months, as she died on May 8, 1895 after a stroke. Auguste von Sartorius found her final resting place in the crypt of the Conflans monastery in the parish of Charenton-le-Pont , south of Paris.

literature

  • Wilhelm Jansen: The papal mission organization for children in Germany, its origins and its history up to 1945 , Mönchengladbach 1970.
  • Isa Vermehren : Auguste von Sartorius (1830–1895) , in: Fischer-Holz, Elisabeth (ed.): Call and Answer, Significant Women from the Dreiländereck , Volume 2, Aachen 1991, pp. 89–117.

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personal data
SURNAME Sartorius, Auguste von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German religious and general superior
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1830
PLACE OF BIRTH Aachen
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1895
Place of death Paris