Chris Byrd

42 years ago this month – February 28, 1982 – the sadly truncated life of Sister Anna Marie Branson ended.

As I describe in my book Sisters, her fellow Daughters of Charity in Bolivia had prevailed upon Anna Marie to return reluctantly to the states for overdue medical treatment. She was admitted to the Daughters of Charity hospital in Troy, New York, the afternoon of Saturday, February 27.

In the morning of Sunday, February 28, Anna Marie suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Her sister and fellow Daughter of Charity Sister Serena Branson described what happened in a letter to the Bolivian Daughters of Charity.

“My brothers and sisters took a plane and arrived the afternoon of Saturday. It was hard for them not to be able to communicate with her in any way. We stayed with her constantly and by one o’clock Sunday, she had gone silently to God.”

Anna Marie was only 64. Her family and the Daughters of Charity who loved her and the young Bolivian boys and men in her care, who called her Madrecita (little mother) keenly felt they had lost a saint.

As her nephew, promoting Anna Marie’s sainthood cause was one of the reasons I wrote Sisters.

Her path to sainthood earnestly began in 1936 when she was a 18-year-old freshman at Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown Visitation Junior College. Holy Thursday, while contemplating the Blessed Sacrament’s exposition at Holy Comforter Parish in Washington’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, Anna Marie experienced a profound conversion.

Without knowing what precisely happened, Daughter of Charity Sister Marcella Bromwell in 1941 said of Anna Marie: “Before she came to the community, Sister received an extraordinary grace from God, an overpowering urge to run in the way of the perfect. Recognizing and embracing this grace, Sister had little need to seek God; she possessed Him and allowed herself to be possessed by Him.”

This transformative understanding animated everything that followed in my aunt’s life and flourished most expressively when she served among Bolivia’s indigenous poor from May 1963 to her death.

The letters Anna Marie wrote during this period to her American Provincial, the late Eleanor McNabb and her parents reveal attitudes that demonstrate why many regard my aunt as a saint. Researching Sisters, these letters became scripture to me, which inform my pursuit of holiness, and I hope Anna Marie’s words affect you similarly.

From Santa Cruz in 1964, Anna Marie wrote to Eleanor: “Being surrounded with people whose next meal is not in sight, with children in tattered thin shirts, teeth chattering from the cold of an accustomed sur (cold wind from the south) is pretty strong incentive not to use precious money that is needed for their survival on needless conveniences.”

The question Anna Marie raises about how affluent believers should relate to those with little material wealth gets to the heart of what it means to follow Christ. Christians of means aren’t immune from life’s trials and challenges, but when contemplating the proper Christian disposition toward society’s disparities, they should remember the evangelist Luke’s words: “to whom much has been given, much will be required.”

The following realities should spur their action. According to website The Balance, in 2020, the top 20 percent of Americans controlled 52.2 percent of U.S. income while the bottom 20 percent possessed three percent of the nation’s income. Anna Marie’s words challenge believers to do more counteract these egregious, unfair and unjust imbalances.

Anna Marie’s words also encourage affluent believers to live with greater solidarity with those who are poor. She urges us to be willing to “do anything and everything” to help lift them out of poverty and to regard people who are poor “as real, live heart-rending human persons.”

“The most important thing,” she wrote Eleanor from Santa Cruz, “is being willing to be spent, sort of eaten alive by their constant needs – from a distance I was presumptuous enough to think I was prepared for it – but being immersed in the situation brings to light all I glossed over, depths of selfishness and un-lovingness – I need your prayers!”

Her willingness to be spent to relieve the misery of the poor people she accompanied is all the more remarkable when you consider how Anna Marie downplayed or ignored her precipitously failing health in the last decade of her life to continue to serve.

Pope Francis recently proposed a new path for sainthood that speaks to how Anna Marie witnessed to the gospel. This path is reserved for people who freely and voluntarily offer their life in the face of a certain and soon-to-come death, marked by a “close relationship” between the offering of one’s life and the individual’s premature death.

These souls also must demonstrate Christian virtues and have a reputation for holiness, after they die. And they should have a miracle ascribed to them.

Except for the final criterion, the above describes Anna Marie, and her reputation for holiness survives her.

A giant in her own right, former Covenant House director, Daughter of Charity, the late Sister Mary Rose McGeady, however, makes the most evocative case for Anna Marie’s sainthood.

Soon after her death, Mary Rose wrote of my aunt: “One enjoyed her company, one yearned for her rare scribbled notes, one treasured the deepening relationship with her, one watched in awe the process of one becoming daily more totally immersed in Christ. One indeed felt privileged to have witnessed the gradual but certain evolution of a saint.”

Editor’s Note: Quoted letters are courtesy of the Daughters of Charity Province of St. Louise, St. Louis, Missouri.

I’m indebted to the Daughters of Charity’s Archives for their tremendous help with researching Sisters. As I wrote in the book’s Acknowledgments, Sisters wouldn’t have happened without their indispensable support.

Sisters can purchased here for $19.99, plus shipping and handling. Autographed copies can be obtained at my site for $25, includes shipping and handling. People in the DC area can purchase Sisters for $19.99 at Politics and Prose bookstores.