Maria Restituta Kafka

Early life She was born Helene Kafka in Husovice, near Brno, on 1 May 1894, the sixth daughter of Anton Kafka, a shoemaker, and his wife, Maria Stehlík. In 1913 she became a nurse at the municipal hospital in the Lainz neighborhood of the city. While working as a nurse, Kafka met members of the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity () and entered their congregation the following year, at the age of 20. She was given the religious name of Maria Restituta, after the 4th-century martyr Restituta. Conflict and martyrdom for Kafka in Mödling The Mödling hospital was not spared the effects of the 1938 Anschluss, in which Germany annexed Austria. Kafka was very vocal in her opposition to the new regime, which had immediately begun to implement the Nuremberg Laws established by the Nazi Party in Germany upon its acquisition of power. She called Hitler a "madman" and said of herself that "a Viennese cannot keep her mouth shut". When a new hospital wing was constructed, Kafka kept to traditional Catholic practice and hung a crucifix in every room. The Nazi authorities demanded that the crosses be taken down, threatening her dismissal, but she refused. After her imprisonment on Ash Wednesday 1942, Restituta Kafka spent over one year on death row. On 30 March 1943, she was beheaded in the Vienna Regional Court. She was 48 years old. ==Veneration==

On 21 June 1998, on the occasion of Pope John Paul II's visit to Vienna, Kafka was beatified. She was the first virgin martyr of Vienna. Maria Restituta Kafka, the only religious sister to be formally condemned to death in the area of the "Greater Germanic Reich," was commemorated in Rome on the evening of 4 March 2013, in the Basilica of San Bartolomeo all'Isola on Tiber Island, with a liturgy of the word at which Cardinal Christoph Schönborn presided. During the service, the Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity handed to the basilica a small cross which Kafka had worn on the belt of her religious habit. The relic was placed in the chapel there which remembers the martyrs of National Socialism. In Restituta Kafka's honour, the western half of Weyprechtgasse, a lane running before Mödling Hospital, was renamed Schwester-Maria-Restituta-Gasse. Also there is a park named in her honour in her native Husovice: Park Marie Restituty. Near the location of her birthplace a church dedicated to her was consecrated in September 2020. ==References==