Maria Kaupas

Chicago’s Second Cabrini

Casimira Kaupas was born in 1880 in the Lithuanian village of Ramygala, then under Russian rule. At seventeen she crossed the Atlantic to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to keep house for her brother, Father Anthony Kaupas, pastor of a Lithuanian parish. In Scranton she encountered teaching sisters at work among immigrant children, and the sight fixed her vocation. After religious formation with the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross in Ingenbohl, Switzerland, she returned to America.

On August 29, 1907, with the sponsorship of Bishop John W. Shanahan of Harrisburg, she and two companions founded the Sisters of St. Casimir in Scranton, dedicated to serving Lithuanian immigrant communities; she received the religious name Maria. The congregation moved its motherhouse to Chicago in 1911, where the Lithuanian immigrant population was concentrated.

Over her 27 years as general superior, the sisters staffed parochial schools across Lithuanian-American parishes, founded St. Casimir Academy, returned the congregation to Lithuania itself in 1920, and entered healthcare with Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, opened in 1928. During the 1918 influenza epidemic her sisters nursed the sick when there were, in her words, too few doctors and too few to give care.

Mother Maria died of cancer at the Chicago motherhouse on April 17, 1940; a Chicago newspaper called her Chicago’s second Cabrini. Her cause was taken up by the Archdiocese of Chicago, and on July 1, 2010, she was declared Venerable under Pope Benedict XVI. A reported healing attributed to her intercession has been under Roman review.

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