Bl. Sára Salkaházi

Sára Salkaházi was born in 1899 in Kassa, then in Hungary and now Košice in Slovakia. She worked as a teacher, a bookbinder's apprentice, a hat maker and a newspaper journalist, writing about poverty and women's working conditions.

When she first asked to join the Sisters of Social Service, a Hungarian community founded in 1923 for charitable and social work, they turned her away. She was a chain smoker and a successful journalist, and they were not sure she fitted. She gave up smoking and was admitted in 1929, at thirty.

During the Second World War her community hid Jewish people in Budapest, and Sister Sára ran one of the houses where they sheltered. On December 27, 1944, members of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazi party, raided the house. They took her and the people she was hiding to the bank of the Danube and shot them. Her body was never found. She was beatified in 2006.

Her community at first doubted whether she was suited to religious life, and so did she. She worked through it, gave up smoking with great difficulty, and later offered her life for the sisters and the people in her care.

Sára Salkaházi was beatified in 2006.

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