Franciscan Sisters of Maria Stern
The congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of Maria Stern is a Catholic religious order that was founded in Augsburg in 1258 . Here she is still based with her motherhouse , maintains various subsidiary foundations and her Franciscan Sisters, called star sisters , work in pastoral care, nursing the sick and the elderly .
history
According to tradition, two Augsburg bourgeois daughters began life in a religious community in 1258 with their widowed mother and several other young women in the "Haus zum Stern". They were cared for pastoral care by the Franciscans of the opposite monastery . 1289, the sisters took the rule of the Third Order of Saint Francis on. Augsburg became Protestant during the Reformation , but the sisters remained true to the Catholic faith, but were no longer allowed to accept novices . Only four of them were left when this law was repealed. The sisters suffered great hardship during the Thirty Years' War . During this time they consecrated their monastery to the Mother of God and called their house Maria Stern .
In 1803 the monastery was expropriated by secularization . The sisters were granted a small pension, they stayed in their monastery for rent and were again not allowed to accept novices. There were six old sisters left when Ludwig I of Bavaria allowed monastery life again in 1828, on condition that the sisters took over the schooling for the girls in the city. To do this, the strict enclosure of the monastery had to be given up. Just a month after the official confirmation, the convent accepted novices again and trained them as teachers. In the next twenty years the congregation had a large number of offspring, so that in addition to teaching in elementary and handicraft schools, other charitable and social tasks were also accepted. Several subsidiary monasteries have been founded in Bavaria since 1855. After the sisters were no longer allowed to teach during the National Socialist era and their schools were closed, they took on missionary activities in Brazil , especially in Pernambuco . Since 1937, the ministry of eternal adoration has been practiced in the mother house .
Augsburg was badly destroyed by fire bombs on the night of February 26, 1944, and the motherhouse and novitiate, as well as the old people's home and a children's home, were completely destroyed. Reconstruction took place in the post-war years.
In 1960 the congregation had over 1,100 sisters in 105 branches, 100 of them in Bavaria, one in Venice and four in Brazil. However, as in many active religious communities, the number of sisters has been declining since the 1960s . In 1992 a branch was established in the Republic of the Congo , and in 1998 one in Mozambique . In Germany, the sisters work in schools, retirement homes, day care centers and pastoral services. The order's own schools in Augsburg, Immenstadt and Nördlingen were handed over to the schools of the Diocese of Augsburg in the 1990s .
Superior General of the Maria Stern Sisters is M. Sofia Salanga, who was re-elected at the General Chapter in Augsburg in February 2019.