Rosa Flesch

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Rosa Flesch at the age of about 40, painted by Octavie de Lasalle
Waldbreitbach, Marienhaus Monastery

M. Rosa Flesch (born February 24, 1826 in Schoenstatt near Vallendar ; † March 25, 1906 in the Marienhaus monastery near Waldbreitbach ; actually Margaretha Flesch ) was the founder of the Waldbreitbach Franciscan Sisters of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary of the Angels . The motherhouse of this order is the Marienhaus monastery below the Waldbreitbach district of Glockscheid. She was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2008 .

Life

In Margaretha's year of birth, 1826, her father Johann Georg Flesch, an oil miller by trade, had his job in the monastery mill in Schoenstatt near Vallendar. After a few brief moves, in 1838 he leased his own mill in the Fockenbachtal near Niederbreitbach (commonly known as the Flesch mill ). At that time, Margaretha's family included her father, a stepmother (her birth mother had died in 1832), two younger siblings and three half-siblings. Since several millers in the Fockenbachtal competed with each other, the Fleschs always lived in need and were too poor to pay the tax for acquiring citizenship. Nevertheless, the parents made it important that their children could go to school.

After her father's death in 1842, at the age of 16, Margaretha was responsible for the survival of her family. She collected medicinal herbs in the nature of the Fockenbach valley and made teas from them, which she sold to Waldbreitbach's only pharmacy . Even then, she was self-taught in nursing.

In 1851 Margaretha left her parents' house and moved with her sister Maria Anna into one of the two hermit apartments in the Kreuzkapelle on the Wied between Waldbreitbach and Hausen . The conditions in the unheated dwelling in snowy winters were harsh. Between 1852 and 1863 she lived from handicraft lessons in various schools, took on sewing and mending work, was active in outpatient nursing and took care of orphans around her. It is not known when Margaretha, who was closely associated with pastor Jakob Gomm, who was introduced to Waldbreitbach in 1850, first made contact with the Franciscans ; they can be verified for the first time in 1854. It can be seen as certain that Margaretha was never a member of the Third Order in Waldbreitbach. She was close to St. Francis of Assisi from an early age.

While Margaretha's schoolmate Peter Wirth succeeded in founding his own order of the Franciscan Brothers of the Holy Cross as early as 1862, Pastor Gomm initially rejected her own request to build a hospital and orphanage and to found a new Franciscan community. Margaretha Flesch, with her sick sister and some companions who had joined her, even had to leave the Kreuzkapelle in 1860 in favor of the Franciscan Brothers and move into a small apartment. With the help of her stepbrother, Aegidius, she then built a simple house with a sick bay on the Kapellenberg, on which she had bought rocky land cheaply in 1857 , without the support of the parish . In 1863 Margaretha received permission to take religious vows . She took the religious name Maria Rosa .

Until the first general chapter , Mother Rosa led the community she founded without statutes. Only after six years was the statute adopted on October 21, 1869, and Mother Rosa was elected almost unanimously as the first general superior. She retained this office until 1878 with comparable results after two re-elections every three years. At that time, the Franciscan Sisters of Waldbreitbach had already founded over 21 branches with over 100 sisters.

In 1878 Mother Rosa had to suspend after two re-elections for at least one term of office according to the statutes. Reelection would have been possible in 1881, but she never received a managerial position and lived - after temporary work in other branches - as a simple sister in the Marienhaus monastery until her death on March 25, 1906. There is hardly any more than the last 30 years of her life something known firsthand, as all of her handwritten notes were deliberately destroyed to wipe out the memory of the founder. A last photo from 1905 shows her 79 years old in a wheelchair at the side of her successor as Superior General, Sister Agatha Simons.

medal

The Waldbreitbach Franciscan Sisters are a congregation of the regulated Third Order of St. Francis , to which a large number of Franciscan religious communities founded in the 19th century belong; A distinction should be made between them and the non-regulated lay groups outside the monasteries, which were formed to form the Ordo Franciscanus Saecularis (OFS, formerly: Franciscan Community (FG)).

In addition to the refreshment stops and educational opportunities in the monastery Marie house itself, which was founded by the Order in 1903 maintains GmbH today more than 50 social institutions (hospitals, nursing homes, children's homes, hospices, schools) in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia , Rhineland-Palatinate , Hesse and Saarland with over 11,000 employees.

reception

The official obituary for Mother Rosa's death in 1906 was that in 1878 she had voluntarily withdrawn from the Order's leadership due to "exhaustion". This picture, created not only by the press, explains the initial disinterest of posterity in the person of the founder. At first she received only a simple grave in the cemetery of the mother house . Only after the death of their greatest adversary, the spiritual rector of the community, Konrad Probst, in 1915, the remains were transferred to the newly created crypt in the motherhouse cemetery at the instigation of his successor. With the start of the beatification process in 1957, her remains were recognized. In 1987, Mother Rosa's coffin was ceremoniously transferred to its current location in the church of the mother house.

It was not until the middle of the 20th century that three theologians published publications about Mother Rosa who tried to reconstruct her life and work. However, they could not fully evaluate the records of fellow sisters and family members in the archives of Waldbreitbach, Koblenz and Trier. In addition, the respective order leaders tried to influence the authors significantly in their representations. Groeteken, for example, had to sue the ecclesiastical court of the Archdiocese of Cologne for the printing of his manuscript, which he completed in 1940 . Nevertheless, the work was not distributed at the instigation of the order.

A comprehensive evaluation of previously unnoticed - possibly also deliberately suppressed - source material by a recent publication by the Cologne theologian Hans-Joachim Kracht (2005) corroborates the thesis implicitly indicated in earlier works that Mother Rosa was the victim of an intrigue by the rector Konrad Probst in the Alliance with sister Agatha Simons. Both belonged to a younger generation, and there had been differences of opinion with Mother Rosa on organizational issues relating to everyday community life. According to Kracht and Böckeler, the rector manipulated the election in 1881 and threatened electoral sisters with expulsion in the event of mother Rosa's re-election. Although the rector had no competence to carry out his threat, many of the sisters were intimidated by it. Most of Mother Rosa's companions from the very beginning then left the order, while the silence that remained provoked the foundress to be forgotten. Around 1900, many sisters of the next generation no longer knew that the handicapped sister Rosa, who they knew as a manufacturer of paraments and herb gardener, was the founder of the order.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of her death , exhibitions and retrospectives on the life of Mother Rosa and the history of the religious order were held in various hospitals, for example in Wadern and St. Wendel .

The original statements of Mother Rosa's, which Hans-Joachim Kracht collected, which have only survived through third parties, paint the picture of a personally modest but resolute character. Mother Rosa was called to a life in evangelical poverty and wanted the consistent implementation of this ideal for her monastic community as well. She had not planned the initiation of such a widely branched and supra-regionally organized order.

beatification

On March 18, 1957, Jakob Backes, Rector of the Waldbreitbach Franciscan Sisters from 1952 to 1957, forwarded the documents for the Diocese of Trier to the Vatican for further examination in order to initiate the beatification process. There it took the responsible congregation 27 years (1972–1999) to evaluate the material and the testimonies. On April 19, 2005, the examination committee gave a positive vote. In April 2006 it was announced in a decree of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints that Pope Benedict XVI. officially confirmed the “heroic virtues” of Mother Rosa. On July 6, 2007, Benedict XVI confirmed that when Mother Rosa was invoked, a miracle of healing occurred. This formally ended the beatification process. The beatification decree was made by Benedict XVI. made out on the day of beatification. It took place on May 4th, 2008 in Trier Cathedral and was the first beatification there. Joachim Cardinal Meisner performed the beatification as the Pope's delegate .

The memorial of Mother Rosa Flesch is the year June 19 , the anniversary of their perpetual profession , celebrated.

Representations in art

  • The oldest known depiction is an oil painting by Octavie de Lasalle (1866) that hangs in the cloister of the Marienhaus monastery.
  • One of the stained glass windows designed by Helmut Rams (1924–1975) in 1956 in the Waldbreitbach parish church depicts Mother Rosa in a procession of religious who come from the Chapel of the Cross and walk towards the Lamb of God.
  • 21 door pictures designed by Karl Unverzagt in 1980 with scenes from Mother Rosa's life hang in the education and conference center of the Marienhaus monastery.
  • One of the choir windows of the Liebfrauenkirche (Koblenz) executed by Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen in 1992 as part of the overall concept “Women in Salvation” is the first representation of Mother Rosa outside of Waldbreitbach.
  • In the Church of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary in Wadgassen in Saarland, Cologne artist Clemens Hillebrand depicted Mother Rosa in one of the twelve windows in the nave.
  • On the occasion of her beatification, a roughly life-size Mother Rosa sculpture by Elisabeth Wagner was placed in the west choir of Trier Cathedral. The figure is located in a baroque niche that originally contained an apostle figure, which was later lost. In further niches there are statues of other Trier Seliger, Peter Friedhofen and Blandine Merten .

Honors

In Niederbreitbach and Waldbreitbach a street (Margaretha-Flesch-Straße) is named after Rosa Flesch.

literature

  • Hans-Joachim Kracht: Rosa Flesch. Passion for people. Margaretha Rosa Flesch - Life and Work , Paulinus-Verlag Trier 2005, ISBN 3-7902-0332-7
  • Hans-Joachim Kracht: Rosa Flesch. Passion for people - Volume 2, documents , Paulinus-Verlag Trier 2006, ISBN 978-3-7902-0334-9
  • Evamaria Durchholz: Broken up for life , Patris Verlag 2008, ISBN 978-3-87620-320-1

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ DDP: Mother Rosa, the founder of the order, beatified in Trier Cathedral , May 4, 2008, accessed on May 5, 2008
  2. ↑ https://www.waldbreitbacher-franziskanerinnen.de/selige-mutter-m-rosa/skulptur-der-seligen-mutter-rosa-im-trierer-dom/skulptur-mutter-rosas-im-trierer-dom/

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Flesch, Rosa
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Flesch, Margaretha (maiden name); Flesch, Maria Rosa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Foundress of the Waldbreitbach Franciscan Sisters of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary of the Angels
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1826
PLACE OF BIRTH Schoenstatt near Vallendar
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 1906
Place of death Marienhaus Abbey , Waldbreitbach