URSULA MUFFLIN, VIRGIN AND ABBESS - 3 MAY

  

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN MAY

Saints celebrated on the 3rd of May

Prayer to the Angels and the Saints

Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.

In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.

Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.

Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.

URSULA MUFFLIN, VIRGIN AND ABBESS 

Ursula, surnamed Mufflin, was the last abbess of the monastery of St Clara in Nuremberg and successor of Catharina Pirckheimer, and she was by the same token the last victim of Protestant intolerance there.

Clinging to her faith and to her Order with unshakable loyalty to her last breath, she died in 1587 - according to her Order's records at Munich. Other sources say that 1590 was the year she went to her eternal reward.

The ordeal she had to undergo was a martyrdom - slow, and bloodless, but no less painful for that.

[Seemingly forgotten by everyone, the sisters resisted takeover by the council government authorities.] From time to time Catholic priests came to the monastery from Bamberg and Spalt - needless to say, in disguise - and administered the Sacraments to courageous Ursula and her remaining fellow sisters.

By the year 1580 there were only three sisters left (apart from the abbess, only Ursula and the conventual Felicitas Obermair were still alive). With the death of these last nuns, the "evangelical" council of the city of Nuremberg had achieved its goal: the evangelical counsels were no longer followed (1). Prior to this, abbess Caritas Pirckheimer had suffered the same fate from 1503-1532, after her her sister Clara, who died the following year, and her niece Catharina up to 1563.

[Note (1). After all the original nuns had died - they were forbidden to take on new sisters to continue the monastery - the government Protestant authorities [who called themselves  "evangelical" in German] seized everything belonging to the monastery and the monastery itself.]

(Information from Stadler's Complete Encyclopedia of Saints, 1858 - 📷 1. The monastery church St Clara, which still exists. The nuns' cemetery behind the church.)