Blessed Hildegard Burjan

Hildegard Freund was born at Görlitz in Silesia in 1883 to Abraham Adolf Freund and Berta Sochsazewska. She married the engineer Alexander Burjan in 1907, and their daughter Elisabeth was born of the marriage. After recovering from a grave illness she was baptised at Berlin in 1909. Moving to Vienna, where her husband was also baptised, she took important political office in the Christian Social party as a representative of Catholic working women. In 1918 she founded Caritas Socialis, a women's religious association for the deepening of social work, which grew into a congregation of sisters consecrated to prayer and to works for the most needy. After the First World War she was elected to the Constituent Assembly and was noted for her interventions in favour of Catholic education and a Christian solution to the grave social problems of the post-war years. Leaving politics, she gave herself entirely to social service and the Christian apostolate as general directress, a married laywoman, of her foundation. She died in Vienna on 11 June 1933 after a painful illness.