Who is Mary Francis Bachmann?

Anna Maria Boll was born on November 14, 1824, in Wenigumstadt, Bavaria, one of seven children. Her father, a farmer, also operated a store in which the Boll family worked. In the early 1840s, she married Anthony Bachmann and later immigrated to the United States. Anna Maria Boll Bachmann (later known as Mother Francis) became a widow with three children and pregnant with a fourth child when her husband was killed in an accident at a construction site in Philadelphia in 1851. To support herself and her young family, Anna operated a small shop and hostel for immigrant German women. Wishing to join Religious life, Anna sought the advice of Rev. John Hespelein, CSsR, who wrote to Bishop John Neumann, then in Rome. Bishop Neumann had already asked Pope Pius IX for permission to bring German Dominican Sisters into his diocese, but was advised by the Pope, also a member of the Franciscan Third Order Secular, to establish a congregation of Franciscan Sisters in the Philadelphia diocese. Bishop Neumann approved the request of Mrs. Bachmann and her companions. When he returned to Philadelphia, Bishop Neumann instructed the women, provided spiritual guidance, and accepted them into religious life. On Easter Monday, April 9, 1855, the Bishop invested the three founding members in the habit of St. Francis, giving to Anna the name Sister Mary Francis:

Mother Bachmann and her sisters served the people of God wherever a need existed. Initially, in addition to hosting immigrant women, the sisters nursed the sick poor while supporting themselves and the sick by piecework sewing. At the time of the smallpox epidemic of 1858, they continued their care for the sick in patients’ homes or, when necessary, in their convents. During that same year they responded to the need for teachers at St. Alphonsus Parish in Philadelphia. For a short time the following year the sisters staffed an orphanage in Philadelphia, the first of several residences serving children where the sisters would minister. In December 1860, Mother Francis opened the congregation’s first hospital, St. Mary’s in Philadelphia, because the sisters’ convents could not accommodate all their sick poor. The sisters themselves had few resources apart from their courageous spirit and their trust in God. Yet Mother Francis concluded, “As long as God does not stop giving to us, we shall not stop giving to the poor.” While visiting the sisters working with the community in Buffalo, NY in late 1862 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Exhausted from travel and ravaged by the disease, Mother Francis died on June 30, 1863 at the age of thirty-nine.