The beatification of the Venerable Marta Anna Wiecka, Daughter of Charity, will take place on 24 May 2008, close to the residence of the Archbishop of Lviv. Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone, Secretary of State of Holy See, will preside over the liturgy.

Marta Anna Wiecka became a postulant with the Daughters of Charity in 1892, at the age of eighteen. She took her vows in the Congregation in 1897, and from then until her death in 1904 she spent most of her time working in hospitals in the Ukraine, caring both for the bodily and the spiritual needs of the sick and the dying.

While working at Sniatyn, Sister Marta volunteered to take the place of the young man who had been given the job of cleaning out the room of a typhus patient. She subsequently became ill with the fever herself. After a brief illness, she died on 30 May 1904 at the age of thirty. Her funeral was an occasion of grief for people of many religions - Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Orthodox – and for those who professed no religion at all.

Sister Wiecka’s tomb immediately became a place of pilgrimage. With the rise of the Soviet Union, the Daughters of Charity were forced to leave Sniatyn and, of course, her remains. When they were at last able to return in 1993, they discovered that the tomb was covered with fresh flowers and that pilgrims were kneeling there to pray.

In 1997 the Archbishop of Lviv opened the diocesan inquiry for the beatification of Sister Marta. Seven years later, in 2004, she was proclaimed venerable. And on 6 July 2007 Pope Benedict XVI authorized the promulgation of a decree concerning her cause. The result of this decree is her beatification next week.