Majella Lenzen

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Majella Lenzen (born November 25, 1938 in Aachen ) is a former nun , nurse , trained hospital manager and author . She belonged to the order of the Mariannhiller Missionary Sisters and worked as a missionary sister in East Africa for almost 40 years . She currently lives in Birkesdorf , a district of Düren .

Life

Majella Lenzen is the daughter of Erika and Ludwig Lenzen, who gave her their first name after their aunt and godmother, a religious woman with the religious name Majellinna (after St. Gerhard Majella ). She has a brother who is three years her junior. Her father was a journalist and an avowed Catholic ; During the war, the family moved from Aachen to the Ore Mountains because the father in Aachen expected repression because of his denominational beliefs. After the end of the Second World War , the family fled from the Red Army and came to the Lüneburg area . According to Majella Lenzen, the father attached importance to discipline and religious instruction of the children in upbringing; on July 5, 1971, he was ordained a deacon in Aachen , published numerous novels and stories and died in 1982. Majella Lenzen and her brother attended the elementary school in Kolkhagen and the grammar school in Lüneburg.

At the age of 15, Majella Lenzen came to the mission boarding school of the Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood in Neuenbeken at the suggestion of her parents . Life there was like a monastery. In 1957 Lenzen passed the Oxford O-Level exam . Subsequently, also in Neuenbeken, the probationary period for entering the order began with the postulate and, after the dressing , in which Majella Lenzen took the religious name Maria Lauda , with the novitiate . She made her profession for the first time on September 8, 1959 . She chose her religious name Lauda (from Latin laus "praise") because she understood her way of life as a religious as a vocation to "God's praise".

On December 8, 1958, Sr. Lauda flew to East Africa as a missionary sister and began training as a nurse at the Nairobi European Hospital ( Grade A Nurse ) in January 1959 in Nairobi , Kenya ; In 1963 she received the State Registered Nurse (SRN) certificate . Her career aspiration as a doctor was repeatedly not approved by the leadership of the order. In August 1963 she was transferred to Tanzania and initially worked in a maternity hospital in Morogoro , for which it was necessary to acquire knowledge in obstetrics . She made her perpetual profession on December 8, 1963 . In 1965 she was transferred to Turiani to work in a bush hospital. In 1966 she took over the management, which she held until 1982. From 1974 to 1975 she completed an education in hospitality management in London , which she graduated with a diploma on July 17, 1975; in London she lived in the Porotbello convent of the Dominican Sisters . In December she returned to Turiani. During the entire time she was in charge, she developed the facility there conceptually and with financial help from her parents and donors from Germany, and achieved her acceptance into the state health system of Tanzania and, in 1977, a grant from the Misereor Episcopal Relief Organization .

In 1979 the sisters elected her as the delegate for Tanzania to the General Chapter of the Order. From this chapter she was appointed to a special commission that revised the statutes of the order according to the specifications of the Decree Perfectae caritatis passed by the Second Vatican Council on the contemporary renewal of religious life ; The implementation of these requirements was also a matter of concern to her in her African operational areas during these years. From October 1982, she was the Superior General of Mary Hiller Missionary Sisters of the Provincial Superior in the neighboring province in Zimbabwe , based in Bulawayo determined because she had experience in Africa, but not from the stressful events in the former Rhodesia was charged as she was told. She was unable to assert herself with her reform projects in the province and was not re-elected as provincial superior in 1987 for a second term. Her request to serve in the mission in Korea now was rejected. Thereupon she was exclaustrated as a religious woman for one year , which she spent in Germany with her mother. During her work in Africa her doubts about the meaning of the rigid missionary practice had grown; In their experience, the encrusted structures of the religious order could not be reconciled with the working conditions of the nuns.

In 1988 Sister Lauda was transferred to the Motherhouse of the Congregation in the Netherlands . In November 1989 she took part in a health congress on AIDS in the Vatican and then in an AIDS seminar at the Medical Mission Institute in Würzburg , where the German medical professor August Wilhelm von Eiff named condoms as a means of protection against AIDS. From February 1990 to October 1993 she worked on behalf of her order as AIDS coordinator in the Diocese of Moshi and got a job in the episcopal ordinariate . She took part in a three-month course at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam , where there was also an exchange of experiences with African health care professionals. In Moshi, a church was converted into an AIDS center - the Rainbow Center - which was consecrated by the bishop on March 1, 1993. She organized the training of health advisors, the improvement of preventive measures in the hospitals and the information of teachers and priests on the AIDS problem.

However, the Bishop of Moshi did not renew her contract and the Order informed her that he had no further use for her. The reason given was that she had participated in 1992 in the distribution of condoms to prostitutes , which a doctor had carried out for AIDS prevention, in the order habit . This justification is disputed by the religious order. Majella Lenzen returned to Germany and took care of her sick mother, who died in 2001. In 1994 she was released from the order and released from her vows at her own request in 1995, because this was a necessary prerequisite for clarifying her pension claims.

Since then, Majella Lenzen has written three books, is active as a journalist and has repeatedly participated in talk shows and congresses, mainly on the subjects of leaving the Order and fighting AIDS.

Awards

  • June 17, 2004: Honorary award from the Düren district
  • March 5, 2010: Annemarie Madison Prize from the Board of Trustees for Immune Deficiency (KIS), Munich

Works

  • May God forbid that - Why I can no longer be a nun , DuMont-Verlag Cologne, 2001, ISBN 3-8321-9519-X
  • Do not be afraid !: My way out of the monastery , DuMont-Verlag Cologne, 2012 ISBN 3-8321-9689-7
  • Freed from shackles - How my faith gives me inner freedom , Gütersloher Verlagshaus 2015, ISBN 3-5790-8525-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marjella Lenzen: May God forbid that - Why I can no longer be a nun. Cologne 2001, pp. 17-24.148.
  2. ↑ Marjella Lenzen: May God forbid that - Why I can no longer be a nun. Cologne 2001, pp. 36-44.
  3. ↑ Marjella Lenzen: May God forbid that - Why I can no longer be a nun. Cologne 2001, pp. 53.59.112f.
  4. ↑ Marjella Lenzen: May God forbid that - Why I can no longer be a nun. Cologne 2001, p. 93, p. 62–93.170 in total.
  5. ↑ Marjella Lenzen: May God forbid that - Why I can no longer be a nun. Cologne 2001, pp. 190f.203.234f.
  6. ↑ orden.online: Lenzen, Majella .
  7. ↑ orden.online: Lenzen, Majella .
    Marjella Lenzen: May God forbid     - Why I can no longer be a nun. Cologne 2001, p. 236.250.
  8. ↑ Marjella Lenzen: May God forbid that - Why I can no longer be a nun. Cologne 2001, p. 266ff.
    orden.online: May God forbid that - a former nun breaks the silence , August 29, 2009.
  9. ↑ orden.online: Lenzen, Majella .
personal data
SURNAME Lenzen, Majella
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lenzen, Mariella
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German nun and bestselling author
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Aachen