URSULA MUFFLIN, VIRGIN AND ABBESS - 3 MAY

  

ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN MAY

Saints celebrated on the 3rd of May

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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 - 📷 1. The monastery church St Clara, which still exists. The nuns' cemetery behind the church.