Mary Odilia Berger

Mother Mary Odilia Berger, S.S.M., (30 April 1823 – 17 October 1880) was a German-born Religious Sister who founded the Sisters of St. Mary in 1872 in St. Louis, Missouri, which established and still runs hospitals throughout the Midwestern United States. In 1987 they merged with another congregation which had broken off from them and became the Franciscan Sisters of Mary.

Anna Katharina Berger was born on 30 April 1823 in Regen, in the Kingdom of Bavaria. In 1858 she joined the Poor Franciscan Sisters of the Holy Family in Pirmasens, founded by the Blessed Paul Joseph Nardini. She was sent to Paris to raise funds for the new religious congregation.

Once in Paris, Berger took part in the charitable works of the Abbé Peter-Victor Braun, who chose her in 1866 to lead the new religious congregation of Sisters Servants of the Sacred Heart he founded to give continuity to their work. She had to flee Paris, however, when the city was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War. Forced to return to her homeland, she tried to start a new community in Elberfeld in the Rhineland but was forbidden to do so by the government during the Kulturkampf, a period when religious communities feared that they would be abolished by the government. In 1872 she got permission to emigrate to St. Louis, Missouri in the United States through the sponsorship of a family member she had nursed in Elberfield, who had later emigrated to Missouri. She left Germany with four companions from her small religious community.

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