Magdala Christa Lewandowski
Magdala Lewandowski OP (born August 2, 1933 in Kiel , † February 6, 1977 in Musami, Zimbabwe ) was a Catholic nun and missionary.
She was born Christa Elisabeth Lewandowski in Kiel in 1933 and grew up in a Catholic family in the Gaarden district . After she had already been involved in the church as a teenager and young woman (among other things as a scout and city youth leader), she made the decision to become a religious. A special occasion was the visit to the Lübeck Martyrs Memorial in the Sacred Heart Church in Lübeck in 1955.
In 1958 she gave up her job at a bank and joined the Dominican Missionary Sisters of St. Heart of Jesus . After taking her first vows in the Strahlfeld Monastery (Bavaria), she was sent to the mission to Salisbury in Rhodesia (today Harare , Zimbabwe ). Here she was initially active as a teacher at various mission stations before she worked in teacher training after further studies. In 1971 she came to the St. Paul Mission in Musami, about 70 km from the capital, Harare. Here she became superior of a convent of five Dominican missions.
Although the mission was in the middle of the danger zone of the violently raging Rhodesian civil war, the sisters decided to hold out there and their students and students not to leave. On the evening of February 6th, a group of armed men broke into the mission and rounded up the missionaries. Then Sister M. Magdala Lewandowski, together with the other German sisters M. Ceslaus (Anna) Steigler and M. Epiphany (Bertha) Scheider (73), the British sister M. Joseph (Paulina) Wilkinson (59) and the Jesuit Father Thomas Martin (45, from Great Britain), Father Christopher Shepherd-Smith (34, from Kenya) and brother John Conway (57, from Ireland) shot dead.
On February 10, 1977, Sr. Magdala and her associates were buried in the Chishawasha Mission cemetery with a large crowd.
literature
Helmut Moll (ed.): Witnesses for Christ. The German martyrology of the 20th century . Paderborn 2006
Web links
- Who were the Musami Martyrs? at jesuit.org.uk, accessed March 15, 2017
- Remembering the Musami Martyrs, 40 years on from jesuit.org.uk, accessed May 4, 2017
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lewandowski, Magdala Christa |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lewandowski, Magdala Christa OP |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German Catholic nun and missionary |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 2, 1933 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kiel |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 6, 1977 |
| Place of death | Musami, Zimbabwe |