Bl. Marta Anna Wiecka

Marta Wiecka was born in 1874 in Nowy Wiec, in the Prussian-ruled part of Poland, the third of thirteen children. As a girl she walked twelve kilometres to Mass.

At sixteen she was told she was too young to join the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. She was accepted at eighteen in Kraków and sent to nurse in hospitals in Galicia, now western Ukraine. She cared for patients of every faith. In 1904, at the hospital in Śniatyn, she volunteered to disinfect a room where a patient with typhus had been, to spare a male colleague with a family. She caught typhus and died, aged thirty. She was beatified in 2008.

Marta Anna Wiecka was beatified in 2008.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.