Blessed Marta Anna Wiecka, Daughter of Charity of Sniatyn

Who was Blessed Marta Anna Wiecka?

Blessed Marta Anna Wiecka was a Polish sister of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul who spent her short religious life nursing the sick in the small hospitals of Galicia. She bore a cruel false accusation without defending herself, and she died at thirty because she took a deadly task off the shoulders of a frightened young father. Christians of different churches prayed at her grave in Sniatyn, now in Ukraine, for decades before the Church declared her blessed in 2008. We keep her feast on May 30.

The life of Blessed Marta Wiecka

A farm girl from Pomerania

Marta was born on January 12, 1874, at Nowy Wiec in Pomerania, the third of thirteen children of a well-off Catholic farming family. When she was two she fell gravely ill, and when the doctors could do nothing more, her parents begged the help of the Mother of God venerated at a nearby Marian shrine. She recovered.

She grew up good-natured and prayerful, helping her mother with the housework and looking after her younger brothers and sisters. She had a special love for St. John of Nepomuk. After her First Communion the Eucharist became the center of her life, and she thought nothing of walking twelve kilometers each way to the parish church in Skarszewy for Mass.

"Too young," then Kraków

At sixteen she asked to join the Daughters of Charity at Chełmno, the nearest house, and was told she was too young. Two years later she tried again, but the Prussian government, which then ruled that part of Poland, limited how many candidates the community could accept. So she went south to the Daughters of Charity in Kraków, in Austrian Galicia, where she was accepted. She entered on April 26, 1892, and received the habit on April 12, 1893.

Nurse of the sick

Her first assignment was a hospital in Lviv (Lwów), where she soon became known as a sister who loved her patients. In 1894 she was sent to the hospital at Podhajce, where she served for five years. On August 15, 1897, she made her first vows.

The cross at Bochnia

In 1899 she was moved to the house of her community in Bochnia. There, the Vatican's biography records, she had a vision of Jesus on the Cross, who urged her to bear adversity with patience and promised that one day she would be with him. The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints gives his words this way (in our translation): "Daughter, bear patiently all slanders and all accusations. Soon I will take you with me!"

The trial came quickly. A mentally ill man, recently released from her hospital, spread the rumor that Sister Marta was pregnant after an affair with a patient, a student who was the nephew of the parish priest. She had to live in the middle of the gossip and stay on in Bochnia until time proved her innocent. She did not answer it.

Sniatyn and the typhoid room

After the scandal had died away, she was sent to the hospital at Sniatyn, a town on the Prut River. She had a gift for reconciling people with God, and the biography says she let no one in her care die without the chance to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

In the spring of 1904 a young male nurse, a husband and father, was ordered to disinfect the room of a patient with typhoid. Sister Marta saw his fear and did it herself. She caught the fever. Many people prayed for her recovery, and the Jews of the local synagogue held a prayer service for her. Those at her bedside said she was in ecstasy after receiving Holy Communion for the last time. She died on May 30, 1904, at thirty years old, and was buried in Sniatyn.

Her grave quickly became a place of prayer. In the years after the Second World War, when Sniatyn lay inside the Soviet Union, Christians of several churches came there together. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone beatified her in the Latin Cathedral of Lviv on May 24, 2008.

The miracles of Blessed Marta Wiecka

• Reported: her healing as a two-year-old after her family prayed to the Mother of God.
• Reported: the vision of the Crucified Christ at Bochnia, recorded in her biography.
• Approved: a miracle recognized by the Church for her beatification in 2008.

Symbols of Blessed Marta Wiecka in art

Sister Marta lived in the age of photography, and there is no old artwork of her. Devotional images show her:

• In the habit of the Daughters of Charity, with the wide white winged cornette the sisters wore in her day;
• With a rosary and crucifix, the signs of her prayer;
• At a sickbed or with a basin and towel, for her work as a nurse and the act of charity that cost her life.

Feast day and prayer

We keep the feast of Blessed Marta Wiecka on May 30, the day of her death. The Daughters of Charity honor her, and so do Catholics in Poland and in western Ukraine, where her grave lies. See the feast day calendar.

We know of no traditional prayer to her that we can quote. Let us ask Blessed Marta to pray for nurses and all who care for the contagious sick, for anyone carrying the weight of a false accusation, and for unity among Christians. Blessed Marta Wiecka, pray for us.