Edna Rose Ritchings

Edna Rose Ritchings (c. 1925 – March 4, 2017) was the symbolic maintainer of the International Peace Mission movement. She is also known as Sweet Angel in the movement, or as Mrs. S. A. Divine or Mother Divine because she was the widow of the movement's leader, Father Divine. She assisted Father Divine, who claimed to be God, in his declining years. She and her husband lived in a manor home,which doubled as a Peace Mission headquarters and church known as the Woodmont manor & estate from 1953. It is located at Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb. Father Divine died in 1965 and was later interred in a crypt and mausoleum on the premises. The Woodmont estate continued to be the home of Mrs. Divine.

A Canadian convert from Vancouver, Ritchings was drawn to the movement in its decline in the early 1940s while she was still in high school. As did many adherents of Father Divine, she broke ties with her parents, and adopted a new name, "Sweet Angel". Moving to the then-headquarters of the movement in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she became one of Father Divine's personal secretaries. She proposed to him one day in the office by saying, "I want to marry you because I know you are God."

They were married in secret on April 29, 1946 in Washington, D.C. Ritchings was 21, and Father Divine about 65. The marriage was secret from most followers until Ritchings's visa expired in the summer of 1946, and Father Divine had to disclose it. The wedding date, April 29, thereafter became a celebrated anniversary in the movement.

Father Divine claimed to his flock that Ritchings was the spirit of his first wife reborn. His first wife, Peninniah (d. 1943), was also commonly called "Mother Divine". Reincarnation had not previously been part of Father Divine's doctrine, indeed he had said that the notion of an afterlife was absurd. To prove that it was a chaste marriage in accordance with his teachings, Father Divine assigned a female disciple to be Ritchings's constant companion.

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