Bl. Pauline Mallinckrodt

Pauline von Mallinckrodt was born in 1817 in Minden, Westphalia. Her brother Hermann became a leading Catholic politician. In Paderborn she ran a school for blind children and a nursery.

She hoped a French congregation would take over the school for the blind, but the Prussian government would not allow it. So in 1849 she founded her own congregation, the Sisters of Christian Charity. During the Kulturkampf, Bismarck's campaign against the Catholic Church in the 1870s, her sisters were forced out of Prussia. She sent many of them to the United States, where they started a mother house in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and to South America. She died in Paderborn in 1881 and was beatified in 1985.

Pauline Mallinckrodt was beatified in 1985.

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