Eastern Rite - Blessed Teresa Demjanovich

Today is the Feast of Venerable George, Abbot of Sinai, brother of St. John Climacus, and of Venerable Sophronius of Jerusalem, Patriarch of Jerusalem.

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Blessed Teresa was one of five children born to Alexander and Johanna Demjanovich, immigrants to the United States from an area of the Kingdom of Hungary that is in modern Slovakia. She received Baptism, Chrismation, and First Holy Communion in the Ruthenian Rite of her parents. She was the Valedictorian of her high school class. She then attend the College of Saint Elizabeth at Convent Station, New Jersey. She began her college career in September 1919, majoring in literature, and graduated with highest honours in June 1923. She became a teacher at the Saint Aloysius Academy in Jersey City, New Jersey, and then in the city’s public high school. 

She entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth in 1925. As a postulant and novice, Demjanovich taught at the Academy of Saint Elizabeth in Convent Station during 1925-1926. In June 1926, her spiritual director, Father Benedict Bradley, O.S.B., asked her to write the conferences for the novitiate. She wrote 26 conferences which, after her death, were published in a book, Greater Perfection.

In November 1926, Demjanovich became ill. After a tonsillectomy, she returned to the convent but could barely walk to her room. After a few days, she asked if she could return to the infirmary, but her superior, thinking it odd that someone so young could be so sick, told her, "Pull yourself together." When Bradley saw how sick she was, he notified her brother, who called one of their sisters, a nurse. She went to the convent and immediately took Sister Miriam to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with "physical and nervous exhaustion, with myocarditis and acute appendicitis." Doctors did not think she was strong enough for an operation, and her condition worsened.

Demjanovich's profession of permanent religious vows was made in articulo mortis (danger of death) on 2 April 1927. She was operated on for appendicitis on 6 May and died on 8 May 1927. Her funeral was held 11 May 1927 at Holy Family Chapel in Convent Station, New Jersey, and she was buried at Holy Family Cemetery on the grounds of her order's motherhouse.