Sister Ruth Maria O'Callaghan

Life

Ruth O'Callaghan was born in 1977 in Finglas, on the northern edge of Dublin. As a young woman she experienced a deep spiritual conversion during a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in the summer of 1998, after which she felt a clear call to consecrated life. In February 1999, aged twenty-two, she met members of the Servant Priests and Brothers of the Home of the Mother during their visit to Ireland and was invited to a Holy Week encounter in Spain.

She entered the Servant Sisters of the Home of the Mother that year, received the habit on 16 July 2000, and made her first vows on 2 July 2002, taking the religious name Sister Ruth María of the Eucharist and of the Virginal Heart of Mary. She made her perpetual vows on 8 September 2007.

She spent most of her religious life in Spain and Ecuador, ministering chiefly to young women and the poor, before being entrusted in May 2017 with the foundation of her order's first community in Ireland, at Roscommon. There she served as superior of the community and as a teacher of religion and English at the Holy Family Educational Centre, drawing many young people through her warmth, her musical gifts and her radiant interior life.

In December 2019 she was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer with bone metastases. Over her final year she wrote five spiritual letters to her sisters, friends and family, offering her suffering for the Church, for priests and for vocations. Surrounded by her sisters in prayer, she lifted her hands towards an image of Our Lady and died on 23 December 2020, aged forty-three.