Francis Sisters
The Fellowship of the Franziskus Sisters is a Catholic religious order , which was founded by Father Georg Müßig ( OFMCap ) in Krefeld , in its heyday had over twenty branches and today only runs the Krefeld mother house of the Visitation of Mary with currently five sisters.
They are to be distinguished from the congregation of the Franciscan Sisters, which is active in nursing and has its headquarters in Kleve.
Canonical position
The Community was until 1932 the spiritual catenary of the Provincial RWTH Capuchin province, was then used as Tertiarenvereinigung within the "secular" branch Third Order ( Secular Franciscan Order , OFS) the bishop of the newly created diocese of Aachen assumed in 1946 the hitherto The name given was changed to the Caritas Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis in Francis Sisters of Home and Nursing . After the 1978 Pope Paul VI. carried out reform of the Third Order, they switched to its "regulated" branch (Tertius Ordo Regularis, TOR), to which they still belong today.
Order signet
The signet of the community is a brooch with a brown cross on a round background and underneath the stemma of the Franciscans, i. H. shows the crossed arms of Jesus (bare arm) and St. Francis (arm dressed in the habit).
Community activities
The Franciscan Sisters live in the tradition of the Franciscan Sisters according to the three commandments of poverty, obedience and celibacy. Originally engaged in home and family care of the destitute and needy of any denomination, then with a growing number of members also active in other areas of education and social work and nursing, the community has had to give up these activities more and more recently due to the aging of its members. While she continues the tradition of home and outpatient care in Bocholt, in Krefeld she still dedicates herself to charitable tasks such as feeding the poor, but there the focus is on maintaining a conference and meeting place in the mother house.
In 1999, together with representatives of the First Order, the community founded the TAU Foundation, a Franciscan initiative for the preservation and promotion of Christian values and beliefs in Europe, which resides in the Krefeld motherhouse.
development
At the time of its founding in 1919, the community of Franciscan Sisters consisted of six full-time home care sisters. In the initial phase she did not have a shared house, but used a room belonging to the third-order parish in the Krefeld Caritas house for her meetings during the first year and then a rented apartment at Sternstrasse 5 until she was able to purchase the house at Jungfernweg 1 in 1927. After the house was destroyed by a bombing raid on the night of June 21-22, 1943, the Krefeld community initially remained without a convention. In 1945 she received the house at Steinstrasse 147 from the city of Krefeld, which she used as a convent until 1953 and in which she also maintained a retirement home for fifteen people. In 1953 she returned to the rebuilt house on Jungfernweg, which has served as her mother's house to this day.
The community grew to 36 members by 1929 and in the course of its history founded numerous branches in the Lower Rhine area:
- Krefeld-Traar 1924–1987
- Moers-Hochstrasse 1925–1946
- Kamp-Lintfort 1925–1953
- Neukirchen-Vluyn 1926–1993
- Krefeld-Uerdingen 1926–1974
- Duisburg-Hochheide 1927–1968
- Tönisberg 1929–1982
- Kempen 1930-1960
- Rheydt 1934-1974
- Leuth 1936-1967
- Moers - Asberg 1938–1978
- Mönchengladbach - Rheindahlen 1942–1971
- Krefeld- Capuchin 1943–1950
- Viersen-Bolsheim 1944–1974
- Krefeld-Bockum 1945-1947
- Titz-Müntz 1946–1995
- Krefeld-Hüls 1950–1957
There were also branches in Kleve and Karlsruhe in 1925, which continued to exist independently from 1947.
Following the example of the Krefeld foundation, numerous independent communities were also founded in other cities, of which those in Aachen (1919–1988), Bocholt (1921–1988), Sterkrade (1925–1988) and Werne (1926–1970) in the year 1947 joined the Krefeld parent company.
The previous branch in Bocholt was also initially founded as an independent community in 1922, and at times had its own branches a. a. in Rheine, Duisburg, Nordhorn, Borken, Dülmen and Lüdinghausen and in 1947 joined the Krefeld parent company.
literature
- Father Markus Müßig: The housekeeping of the Third Order of St. Francis. With a foreword by Martin Faßbender. 2. change Ed., H. Rauch, Wiesbaden 1929 (= Library of the Third Order, 23)
- Barbara Wieland: Georg Müssig (Father Marcus OFMCap) . In: Hubert Wolf / Claus Arnold (eds.), The Rheinische Reformkreis. Documents on Modernism and Reform Catholicism, 1942-1955 , Volume II, Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-506-79700-X , pp. 635-637