MOTHER CLARA

An Unknown Someone?

Wherever we are or wherever we go, all of us like to feel comfortable and wanted. When we go to a new place—like a government office to get some work done or a college for admission or a hospital for treatment—it comforts us to personally know someone responsible and trustworthy in that new place. This is a basic human need.

And many times, even though we do not really get to personally meet this someone, we are welcomed in their name and our need fulfilled in their name. That someone remains invisible—at times even unknown.

As someone associated with the St. Isabel’s Hospital community—as a patient, nurse, a student, a doctor, staff or parishioner of the neighbouring Luz Church—you may have experienced the joy of being thus associated. Haven’t you?

Do you know the person behind St. Isabel’s Hospital? That “unknown and invisible someone” who makes you feel at home? In a humble way, this booklet seeks to make known and make visible this someone—she is Mother Maria Clara of the Child Jesus.

Who is Mother Maria Clara?
 


 Libania witnessed and interiorized the fruitlessness of a life empty except for luxury. At 24 now, she was restless to know the way forward for her own life.

Her embrace extends beyond the oceans, in an attempt to reach out to all type of pain, to all abandonment, to all type of dejection. This tenderness and unrestrained mercy take the sisters of Mother Clara to open out horizons and to be the first to venture out into overseas missions.

Baptized as Libânia, she was born in Amadora (in modern day Amadora city in Lisbon, Portugal) on June 15, 1843. She

was baptized in the parish Church of Our Lady of Amparo, Benfica. ‘Amparo’ is a Portuguese word for ‘shelter’ or ‘protection’. She was the daughter of Nuno Tomás de Mascarenhas Galvão Mexia de Moura Telles e Albuquerque and

of Maria da Purificação de Sá Carneiro Duarte Ferreira.

She had a happy childhood as the third of 7 children of a noble and profoundly Christian family. Right from her childhood, her heart began to open to the loving presence of God on account of the Christian witness of her parents.

 Even as a child, she is believed to have been a courteous person with a strong temperament infused with a dignity, delicacy and nobility of character—profiling the heroic personality Libania would turn out to be. No wonder, given the noble ancestry of her parents!

The wonder lies in the doings of God in setting the life of a member from a noble family on a path of sorrow and suffering even while yet an adolescent. The sculpting of the future sister to the poor begins here. In 1856, Libania loses her mother to a cholera epidemic that swept Portugal leveling rich and poor alike.

Her father and siblings became her strength and refuge.

In 1857, Libania lost her father to a wave of yellow fever that swept her country. She is barely 14. As if not to seek to be consoled than to console others, Libania became a ‘little mother’ to her brothers and sisters—with a hope in God’s Providence that seems to emanate from the Christian spirit in enduring suffering.

The time comes for the people, the laughter and the revelry that filled Quinta do Bosque to leave. Two months after her father’s death, Libania and her sister Matilde Henriqueta are admitted into the Royal Asylum of Ajuda, founded by the hospitable King Peter V for the orphans of the noble family, whose parents were victims of the epidemics of 1856 and 1857. In this new home managed by French Sisters—the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, she receives an education and culture proper to a lady of her times: basic study, French, music and feminine courses.

However, experiences of loss and hospitality alternate in Libania’s life.

In May 1862—less than a year after the Royal Asylum loses its protector—with King Peter V himself falling victim to cholera—religious persecution in Portugal leads to these loving French sisters being expelled from the Portuguese territory,