HOLY CROSS HAPPENINGS
Blessed Zdenka, Through the Eyes of Family!
(Photo 1) Marge(Shelling) Van Lierde, niece of Sister Zdenka
(Photo 2) Taken the day after the Beatification ,family members from the United States and Canada pose for a photograph at the head of the common grave where the remains of Bl. Zdenka are buried, along with the remains of other deceased members of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross, in Podunajske Biskupice, outside of Bratislava, Slovak Republic.
(Margaret Shelling Van Lierde of Vienna, Virginia, is the niece of Sister Zdenka. She was kind enough to share her thoughts with us on this blessed lady. Her story gives us a look into the life of Sister Zdenka through the eyes of family and friends. We thank her for her time and reflections.)
Whenever we spoke of my father's deceased sister, Cecilia Schellingova, the conversation always ended with someone saying, "She should be a saint!" Who could have imagined that less than fifty years after her untimely death at the age of 38, she actually would be beatified by Pope John Paul II! On September 14, 2003, our children and I witnessed this emotionally charged event in Bratislava, yet it still seems like a dream.
Cilka, as she was known to family and friends, was born on December 24, 1916, in the village of Kriva in the former Orava County of Austria-Hungary (today's Slovak Republic). She was the second youngest of eleven children in the family of Pavol and Zuzanna (Panik) Schelling. My father, John, who was already 14 years old when she was born, emigrated to the United States when she was only four. My grandfather was a farmer and a wood worker. The children were raised in a home rich in Catholic tradition, where the parents' love of God and neighbor provided them with models for the good people they would become.
Seling (Scheling, Schelling) Family C.1930 in Kriva
Back Row: Maria with two children, Cecilia (Zdenka), Johanna, Alois, Rosa
Seated: Peter-Cyril-Paul (Father), Zuzanne (Mother), Helen with two children
Missing: In America, Paul, John (my father)
When Cilka finished her elementary education, she told her parents that she wanted to devote her life to God by helping others and asked permission to join the Order of nuns who had taught in the village school, the Congregation of Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross. At fifteen, she went to the Provincial House in Podunajske Biskupice, where she began the journey to the life she envisioned for herself.
By this time, my father had settled in Cleveland, married, and had a child. Although the years were difficult during the Depression, he and my mother managed to send the financial assistance necessary to get Cilka established in her new home. Upon completing her secondary education, she graduated from a two-year course in nursing, after which she was accepted into the Novitiate of the Congregation. She was given the religious name "Zdenka" when she professed her simple vows in 1937 and shortly thereafter began to work as a nurse in state hospitals in Bratislava and Hummene. Four years later she made her final vows, and it was not very long before she was asked to return to Bratislava for additional training. She remained there, working in the Department of Radiology. Wherever she was assigned she was greatly loved and respected by her patients, superiors, and co-workers. It has been written that she always had a smile on her face, radiating the love of God and bringing comfort to her patients. Reports say that once you met her you would never forget her, so charismatic was her personality. In 1948, a regime change in the country brought with it the relentless persecution of the Catholic Church. The goal of the communists was to bring about the annihilation of every vestige of religious life in the country. During one terrible spring night in 1950, all the seminaries and the monasteries in the land were raided simultaneously by government forces. Priests and seminarians were herded together and transported to holding facilities. Later, after cruel questioning, trumped up charges, and ludicrous "trials," many were imprisoned in various jails or transported to work camps to perform hard, and often dangerous, labor. The religious sisters who were nurses were allowed to continue their work because their services were desperately needed by the government, while others were detained in various facilities or sent to work in factories.
Aware of what was happening, Sister Zdenka became very troubled as she began to see growing numbers of priests admitted to the hospital for treatment of wounds suffered during interrogation and imprisonment. She wondered if there was anything she could do to help these men. She desperately hoped to save even one priest, if she could, from possible death. Despite much research, we probably will never know the full extent of her involvement or exactly with whom she collaborated in her efforts to make her hope a reality. However, we do know that she facilitated the escape of a priest-patient from his hospital bed during the night of February 19/20, 1952. When she overheard the guard say that this man should be prepared for transportation to his sentencing the following day, she made her decision. After drugging the guard with hot tea laced with a sedative, she escorted the priest out of the hospital into a bitterly cold night. Waiting there was someone who was to help him cross the Danube into Austria. From this incident, it is obvious that Sister Zdenka must have had connections with a group who facilitated the escape of priests to the safety of a nearby country. After her daring deed, she went to the chapel and prayed before the crucifix: "Dear Lord God, for his life I offer my own. Help him to live and to reach safety."
She was arrested on February 29, 1952, when she was caught in an attempt to help six other priests escape from a Bratislava prison. For three months she was questioned and tortured mercilessly in an effort to learn the names of those who had helped her. She remained unwavering in her silence, and for this she was to pay a terrible price. Charged with the crime of high treason, she was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to twelve years in prison and the loss of all of her rights as a citizen. For the next three years she was shuffled among several prisons in the country, during which time she received increasingly severe treatment. She endured starvation, repeated interrogations, humiliation, torture, cold, and sleepless nights, as well as despair and terror. It has been reported that her wounds were not permitted to heal.
At some point during her confinement, she was found to have breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in the Pankrac prison hospital in Prague. It was during this time that she met her caregiver, a fellow patient/prisoner, Helena Kordova, who had volunteered to care for her. Over the next three weeks, the two women developed a most extraordinary relationship, one in which Sister Zdenka came to trust her nurse. Helena was the only person to whom she confided not only the details of her torture and imprisonment, but also of her deep faith and trust in God, and of her willingness to give her own life to save another. By early 1955, the tate of Sister Zdenka's health had deteriorated. Suffering from tuberculosis of her eyes and spine and metastasis of her cancer to her lungs, as well as the effects of harsh imprisonment, she was released after three years of her twelve-year sentence. The Communist regime no longer considered her a threat and was happy not to have to care for a terminally ill person.
Sister Zdenka made her painful way from Pardubice prison to Prague and then on to Bratislava in April of that year with the assistance of courageous friends. She was not received there by her Order (whose members were still serving in the state hospital) for fear of reprisal by the secret police. Quite ill by now, she went to the Provincial House in Trnava but was again turned away for the same reason. Appolinia Gallisova, the friend accompanying her, didn't understand the rejections and immediately took Sister Zdenka into her own home, where she stayed for some days. However, because of her extreme weakness and debilitation, Sister Zdenka required immediate hospitalization. Admitted to the hospital in Trnava, she was then lovingly cared for by the nursing Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross.
Over the next weeks, her health deteriorated further, despite frantic efforts by family members in the United States to get the newest and best medicines for her treatment. She died peacefully on July 31, 1955, and was buried on August 2 in the old cemetery in Trnava. Due to plans by the city in 1979 to turn the area into a park, her remains, along with those of ten other sisters, were exhumed and transferred to the cemetery in Podunajske Biskupice, where her original journey had begun. All were interred in a common grave on October 17 of that year. Here she was to rest for almost twenty-five years. Earlier, the highest court in the land had declared Sister Zdenka innocent of all the charges against her, thanks to a suit brought by her youngest brother, Cyril, in 1970. The charge of high treason had been found to be false and contrived.
Fast forward now to 1990 when the Communist Party no longer ruled Czechoslovakia, and further on to 1993, when the country chose to divide itself into two separate entities, the Slovak and the Czech Republics. Slowly, court records and similar documents from the past became available for research and investigation. Anton Habovstiak, a native of Kriva and a famous author and linguist, had a keen interest in the story of Sister Zdenka and others like her who had suffered so greatly. He began to pore over the numerous legal documents concerning her arrest and conviction, and by 1996 he had put enough pieces of the puzzle together to publish her biography, Za Mrakmi Je Moje Milovane Slnko (Behind the Clouds is My Beloved Sun). Contributing enormously to his research was that loving caregiver from the past, Helena Kordova. Finally released from prison in 1960, she went to live in England, where she remarried and remained until she felt it was safe to visit Slovakia in 1994. A promise she made to Sister Zdenka in prison to come one day to her grave and place white roses there prompted her to learn what happened to the young woman who had touched her so deeply almost forty years earlier. It was at this time that Helena met Anton and was able to share with him details of Sister Zdenka's ordeal, which had been revealed only to her.
From the time of the release of the biography, Dr. Habovstiak wrote of Sister Zdenka extensively in many publications. He supervised the production of a video on her life, which was shown countless times on Slovak television, and he spoke of her courage and commitment to God at numerous seminars, meetings, conferences. The discovery of Sister Zdenka's hand-written prayers and meditations, heretofore considered lost, resulted in their publication in 2002. They were found in clothing trunks by Vincent Pazurik, the husband of
Sister Zdenka's niece, the late Marka Galllikova, who had secretly hidden them for safekeeping. There then developed with the Church of Slovakia a ground swell of support for a petition to the Vatican requesting permission to open the process of investigation for the beatification of Sister Zdenka. And so it happened! Permission was given and the process was opened on September 18, 2000. On July 7, 2003, Sister Zdenka was declared a martyr by the Catholic Church in Clementine Hall of the Vatican Palace in Rome and promulgated as such by the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, in a signed decree. Two months later, on September 14, 2003, during a pastoral visit to the Slovak Republic, he beatified her, the first Slovak woman ever to be named "Blessed."
I was privileged and blessed to attend this event, along with our son, daughter, and future daughter-in-law. My husband stayed behind in Northern Virginia to attend to the needs of my elderly mother. Cousins came from British Columbia, Canada, and other cousins we knew of but had never met came from all over Slovakia. Five bus loads of additional relatives and villagers drove in from Kriva and thousands more from the cities and the countryside, as well as from other European countries such as Poland, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Hungary. Over seven hundred Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross gathered from across the five continents they serve, along with hundreds of other religious sisters. I recognized many who wore the habit of Blessed Mother Teresa. By 8:00 a.m. that Sunday morning, there were over two hundred thousand of us gathered in a huge field in the "new town" of Petrzalka, created during the Communist era, across the Danube from the old town of Bratislava. Not one Catholic church had been permitted in the area in the past, but now the very first one was being completed only a block away from where the Holy Father would be celebrating Mass. One of my cousins, Julian Zatko, lives in Bratislava and was instrumental in getting family members special passes for the event. We were on benches in the eighth row, center, and had a clear view of all that occurred.
Arising that morning, I was filled with enormous excitement. "It was actually going to happen in a few hours!" The sun was making a valiant effort to peek through the rain clouds, which lingered from the day before. By the time we got to the site, the atmosphere was electric. It was cool, the air was a bit foggy, and the area had a mystical feel to it. Security was very tight. We had to pass through check points, helicopters were circling overhead, and "swat" teams dressed in black were adjusting their automatic weapons on the roofs of adjacent buildings. There was a heavy military and police presence on the grounds, and the altar structure itself was surrounded by plainclothes secret service men. Everything seemed just a little unreal. Some people came clothed in their beautiful native Slovak dress. Large banners were held aloft everywhere, and large groups of young people were making their presence known. Almost everyone was waving small flags in the papal colors and there was much cheering. Add to this our excitement about meeting cousins and their children for the first time, of finally being able tomeet and thank Dr. Habovstiak and Helena Kordova, then 86 years old, for all they had done to help bring us to this moment of stunning reality.
The Holy Father made his appearance in his "pope mobile," which made its way through the exuberant crowd and then disappeared behind the structure, where an elevator whisked him up to where the altar was located. It was almost impossible to hear anything because of all the cheering and the chanting. The Pope appeared to be exceedingly frail, and his speech was difficult to understand. The Byzantine clergy, in their red and gold vestments and jeweled crowns, solemnly joined the cardinals and bishops, also dressed in red at the altar as the Bratislava-Trnava Diocese delivered the petition for beatification of Sister Zdenka in a touching address. After the Pope pronounced the rite of beatification, a huge portrait of Sister Zdenka was unveiled as the red curtain covering it was pulled back. Another powerful moment occurred at the Presentation of Gifts. A procession of perhaps twenty people approached the Holy Father, two-by-two with various offerings. A nun sitting next to me whispered that the bowl carried by two young people in native dress contained "the soil." In answer to my questioning look, she explained that soil had been removed from the graves of Sister Zdenka's mother and father in Kriva, from where the ancestral home once stood, from the grounds of the church, and from the center of the village. It represented the foundation which contributed to Sister Zdenka's formation. As the word was passed down our row, tears sprung up in everyone's eyes. The soil! The Schellings had been farmers for generations; they depended on the soil for food. It sustained them, nourished them. What could be more basic to human sustenance? But here it was brought as a gift which represented even more: the source of spiritual nourishment, provided by family and friends who gave their love, nurturing, acceptance, and encouragement. It enabled Sister Zdenka to be the best that she could be, counted finally among the blessed!
During that day and the next, we experienced many more golden moments. After the religious ceremonies, we joined the sisters, in a joyful celebration banquet at the Istropolis in Bratislava. The next morning found us among the sisters, again at a Mass of Thanksgiving in
their beautiful church in Podunajske Biskupice. Here a statue of Blessed Zdenka stood over a portable reliquary containing one of her bones surrounded by white roses. Sisters from India chanted and clanged their cymbals, while sisters from other countries prayed the Intercessions in various languages. All of us joined in the singing of the mighty "Hallelujah," the strains of which still run through my heart. I recall our daughter whispering, "This is what heaven must sound like when we get there!" And, yes, we felt the presence of those family members who had gone before us, rejoicing and giving thanks with us. Afterwards, we were able to pray at the common grave nearby, where Sister Zdenka's smaller bones remain with those of the ten other sisters buried there.
Later, almost forty family members gathered in the Bratislava restaurant and broke bread together after a round of introductions and sharing of family information. We studied the family tree, which I have documented back to about 1760. Pictures were shown, stories told, and faces searched for family resemblance. I believe we were all changed by our experiences in Bratislava that September weekend.
And what about the others? Appolonia Gallisova, the ever-loyal friend who took in Sister Zdenka at perhaps her darkest moment, herself became Sister Lucia, a Sister of the Holy Cross. She served as a powerful witness in the beatification process and died on June 23, 2002, within hours of learning that the Holy Father has approved the petition. Anton Habovstiak, that tireless, dedicated writer who labored long and hard for a cause about which he was very passionate and saw to a successful conclusion, died on April 14, 2004. Helen Kordova-Wildova, at this writing, is living in England.
There is more to the story of Blessed Zdenka Schellingova than what you have read here, and much remains a mystery. My hope is that by writing of the events of her life and the experiences relating to her beatification, readers will come to know her. Shortly before her death, Sister Zdenka said that love and forgiveness (even of our enemies) are the greatest things in life. In those words, she set a powerful example for us to follow. We, her family, will be forever filled with wonder each time we contemplate the depth of her commitment to God and to her fellow man, and we will be humbled by the lessons she has taught us.
