Zdenka Cecília Schelingová

The Blessed Zdenka Schelingová, born Cecília Schelingová, ( born December 24, 1916 in Krivá; † July 31, 1955 in Trnava) was a Slovak nun Community Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross and a victim of the Stalinist persecution of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia. She is revered as a martyr.

Life

Education and religious life

Cecília Schelingová was born the tenth child of her parents and grew up in a devout atmosphere. When the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross in 1929 came after Krivá, she experienced her vocation to religious life. 1931, with 15 years, she asked to be admitted into the community. Before entering the novitiate in 1936, she attended a nursing school and received additional training in radiology. On 30 January 1937 she passed the first vows and received the name Sister Zdenka.

1937-1940 she worked in a state hospital in Bratislava in the inner compartment, then in Humenné in eastern Slovakia and from 1942 again in Bratislava as X-ray laboratory assistant.

According to the testimony of her sisters she lived constantly in the presence of God and in loving devotion for all who met her, especially for the sick.

Martyrdom

After the end of World War II and the establishment of a Communist regime on the Soviet model, the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia was systematically disenfranchised and oppressed. Any resistance was punishable by severe penalties.

The beginning of 1952 came some priests detained for treatment in Bratislava hospital. Sister Zdenka learned that one of them was provided for alleged spying for the Vatican to deportation to a Siberian gulag. She mixed the overseer a sleep aid in the tea and helped to escape the priest. Then she went to the chapel and prayed, " Jesus, I offer my life for his; save him! "

A few days later, on February 29, 1952, she wanted to help you escape three other priests and three seminarians. The plan failed, however. She was arrested by the state security and interrogated for months, humiliated and tortured. On June 17, 1952, she was sentenced to twelve years in prison and ten years of deprivation of civil rights for high treason.

After the remand in Bratislava she came to the prison in Rimavská Sobota, then to Pardubice, Brno and finally to the prison hospital in Pankrác in Prague. Detention and torture had her body so severely damaged that she was fired in April 1955 from custody. She was admitted in the hospital from Trnava By referring a friend. There she could, for the first time after years of detention, again received the sacraments. She died on 31 July 1955.

Worship

As early as 1970 for the judgment against Zdenka Schelingová was posthumously overturned by a court in Bratislava and declared baseless and void. 1979 her remains were brought from the cemetery in Trnava on the monastery cemetery in Podunajské Biskupice.

After only three years in process Sister Zdenka Schelingová was beatified on 14 September 2003 by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Slovakia. Their remains were solemnly transferred to the monastery church of Podunajské Biskupice. Relics of her are now venerated at 34 locations in Slovakia, including in the new Cathedral of the Slovak Military Diocese of St. Sebastian. The parish church of their place of birth Krivá a life-size statue of the Blessed was erected.