Elisabeth 'Mamie' Van Keerbergen

Life

Elisabeth Van Keerbergen, affectionately known as Mamie, was born on 12 July 1908 in Brussels into a non-practising Catholic family. In her youth she worked in a tailor's shop and later kept the accounts for a brewery; she had a particular love of music and especially of opera. On 12 January 1929, aged twenty, she married François Treuttens, a metallurgical entrepreneur, in the Church of Saint Susan in Brussels, and the couple had one daughter, Simonne. Her only sister Jeanne later entered the Sisters of Charity as Sister Helena.

Shortly after Simonne's birth Mamie contracted an incurable eye disease that left her nearly blind, the beginning of more than two decades of physical suffering. In 1954, in the Church of Saint Gertrude in Brussels, she experienced a profound conversion, and in 1962 she was miraculously cured at Lourdes. After her husband's death in 1966 she moved to Santander, in northern Spain, where she devoted herself to caring for sick children and to a hidden life of prayer for priests.

In 1973 she met the young seminarian Rafael Alonso Reymundo, who later founded the Home of the Mother. Mamie became his spiritual mother and, by her own account, was given by Our Lord ninety-nine 'spiritual sons' for whom she offered every pain of her last years, three of them eventually bishops. She died in Santander on 4 August 1994, the feast of Saint John Vianney, patron of priests.