Mary Wilhelmina Lancaster
American Benedictine nun (1924–2019) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mary Wilhelmina Lancaster, OSB (born Mary Elizabeth Lancaster, later taking the religious name Mary Wilhelmina of the Most Holy Rosary; April 13, 1924 – May 29, 2019), was an African-American nun from rural Missouri who founded the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles.[1][2]
Mother Mary Wilhelmina of the Most Holy Rosary | |
|---|---|
| Personal | |
| Born | Mary Elizabeth Lancaster April 13, 1924 St. Louis, Missouri, United States |
| Died | May 29, 2019 (aged 95) Gower, Missouri, United States |
| Religion | Catholic |
Her remains are a case of spontaneous mummification, identified by the Church as incorrupt upon exhuming in May 2023.[3][4] She was previously a member of the Oblate Sisters of Providence.
Mary Wilhelmina was born Mary Elizabeth Lancaster on April 13, 1924 in St. Louis, Missouri.[5] She was a descendent of enslaved African-Americans from Ste. Genevieve, Missouri.[2] She joined the Oblate Sisters of Providence, a congregation of black religious sisters in Baltimore, Maryland, when she was 17 years old and adopted the name Wilhelmina.[5] After joining the congregation, Sister Wilhelmina was a schoolteacher in the eastern United States for over 50 years.[6]
In 1995, at the age of 71, disturbed by what she saw as the modernistic loosening of standards and lax observance of the Rule of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, she left and founded the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 2005, the sisters' community, which attends the Tridentine Mass in Ecclesiastical Latin liturgical language and prays using the 1962 monastic breviary, moved to Gower, Missouri.[7] Sister Wilhelmina died in Gower on May 29, 2019, aged 95.
Four years after her death, the Benedictine Sisters exhumed Sister Wilhelmina's body on the feast of Louis de Montfort so her remains could be re-interred in their church. The sisters expected to find bones but after a few days of digging, they lifted up the simple wooden coffin and quickly noticed a massive crack down the middle of the lid. The prioress of the order, Mother Cecilia, discovered that their foundress' remains, including her religious habit, were almost perfectly intact.[8] Jack Klein, owner of Hixson-Klein Funeral Home in Gower and issuer of her death certificate, confirms that Sister Wilhelmina was not embalmed and that the wood coffin was not placed into any outer burial container.[9][10]
Since Sister Wilhelmina's body was installed in a glass shrine in the abbey church in 2023, a steady stream of pilgrims has visited her remains by the thousands.[11]
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