A young woman’s dream to change lives has made a difference for 175 years
By John Shaughnessy
It’s an unlikely American success story about the power of one person’s life.
It’s a story about how a woman—who rooted her life in living and spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ—continues to have an impact in Indiana and around the world 175 years later.
In 1851, 24-year-old Franciscan Sister Theresa Hackelmeier left her convent in Austria and set out by herself on a journey by ocean, canal, river and land to live her faith-filled version of the American dream.
Arriving in the Indiana community of Oldenburg in the dead of winter, she lived in a small log cabin as she started a new congregation—the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis—with the help of three women from the area who became religious sisters. And when a German woman arrived from Switzerland to join them, they opened a school in September of 1851 to educate German immigrant children in southeastern Indiana.
The sisters also cared for orphan children whose parents died in a cholera epidemic.
Death came too soon also for Mother Theresa Hackelmeier, as she became known after the founding of the Oldenburg Franciscans. Nine years after her arrival in America, she died at the age of 33, but her legacy of faith, courage and education has continued in many ways through the years.
In the second half of the 1800s, the Oldenburg Franciscans established schools across the Midwest, including St. Ann School in Indianapolis, “the only school for African-American children in the then-segregated city of Indianapolis,” according to the congregation’s website.
The sisters also did missionary work with Native Americans in the later part of the 1900s, ministering to the Crow, Cheyenne and Navajo nations in the western states. And the sisters’ international outreach extended to China and Papua New Guinea.
Marian University in Indianapolis and Oldenburg Academy of the Immaculate Conception in Oldenburg also were created upon the spiritual foundations of the Oldenburg Franciscans.
It’s all part of the congregation’s history, a history that began because of the faith, fortitude and fearlessness of a young woman who put her trust in God.
In summing up the history of the Oldenburg Franciscans, its website declares, “Throughout 175 years, in the spirit of the young Mother Theresa Hackelmeier, these Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis have continued to venture courageously from Oldenburg, to carry out the vital mission of living and spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
(The website tinyurl.com/OldenburgOSFhistory is the primary source for this story. It provides more information about Mother Theresa Hackelmeier’s legacy and the impact of the Oldenburg Franciscans.) †
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