‘They Might Be Saints’ Episode Recounts Ven. Mother Maria Kaupas’ Secret to Sanctity

By Michelle Laque Johnson

Ven. Mother Maria Kaupas was known for many things. She was the foundress of the Sisters of St. Casimir. In addition, she had such success founding schools and hospitals in Illinois and Pennsylvania that the government of her native Lithuania asked her help with education in that country – and for doing so awarded her their highest decoration in 1933, the Order of Grand Duke Gediminas. But all of her accomplishments were only possible because of one thing, which was always clear to her.

“She was truly open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit,” says filmmaker Michael O’Neill, who wrote and directed the latest half-hour episode of “They Might Be Saints.” (The episode airs 5:30 p.m. ET, Wednesday, Jan. 6, with an encore at 2:30 a.m. ET, Thursday, Jan. 7.)

“When she felt inspired to start a school or the bishop called and asked her to start a hospital, she would see it as the will of God,” O’Neill continued. “She was open to the Holy Spirit and just walked through these doors that were open to her and made things happen. She had an incredible impact: not just in her example of living a holy life, but in starting schools, hospitals, and sending sisters around the country to help people who were struggling. When things came to her desk, she thought that was a sign that the Holy Spirit wanted her to act on it.”

This would-be saint was born Lithuania in 1880, one of 11 children, to profoundly religious parents. If she is canonized, Kaupas will be the first female saint born in Lithuania. Her brother came to the U.S. to be a priest and called her over at the tender age of 17 to become his housekeeper and to get to know the country. While working for her brother at his Scranton, Pa. parish, she encountered religious sisters for the first time.

“She understood these were women who were living for God alone and that became very attractive to her,” O’Neill said. Kaupas also saw the hardships of her fellow Lithuanian immigrants. When the fathers, who were miners, were killed in accidents, she saw what happened to the widows and children and she grieved for them.

When Kaupas told her brother that she wanted to enter a religious congregation in the U.S., he told her that the American Lithuanian clergy hoped to start an order for women who would educate youth in their faith while preserving their language and culture. Kaupas was eventually asked to lead this venture, which broadened to all who approached the order.

For the first twenty years, the Sisters of St. Casimir focused on their primary apostolate, education. When the United States experienced the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, it was evident to Mother Maria that there were “too few doctors and too few to give care.” (Letter to Sr. M. Josepha, October 16, 1918).

This episode of “They Might Be Saints” recounts Kaupas’ journey from housekeeper to foundress at age 27 of an order, which was named after the patron saint of Lithuania, to her death from bone cancer on April 17, 1940. Says O’Neill: “The way she lived with her disease, the way she accepted dying, the way she offered up her suffering, was an inspiration to her sisters.”

O’Neill, who is also known as the “Miracle Hunter,” recounts a seemingly miraculous intercession by Mother Maria in the episode, although there is a newer one now being considered at the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints that is "in the process of being vetted,” he said.

O’Neill was able to obtain interviews with the Mother Maria Kaupas canonization cause's vice-postulator, members of the Sisters of St. Casimir, people at the schools and churches she founded and the Mother Maria Kaupas Center, and with two of her grand nieces, one of whom told O’Neill that when Mother put her hand on her cheek, she always felt it was "the hand of God" touching her.

Perhaps she felt that way because of this secret to sanctity, which Kaupas herself revealed in one of her letters, writing: “I will not be stingy with God, but having offered Him all, I will persevere in doing His will.”

Ven. Mother Maria Kaupas, please pray for us that we may do the same.