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The Holy Spirit Sisters, also known as the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters or, more formally, the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit, are a Catholic religious congregation founded in the Netherlands by Saint Arnold Janssen in 1889. Maria Helena Stollenwerk and Hendrina Stenmanns were the first leaders of the congregation, and acknowledged as co-foundresses. Helena Stollenwerk also became a co-foundress of the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters as well as a male missionary congregation known as Divine Word Missionaries. The Holy Spirit Sisters are rooted in Trinitarian spirituality. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, and in collaboration with clergy and laity, they live and proclaim the Gospel. Their ministries include the fields of adult and children's education, health, pastoral care, spiritual guidance, catechetics, chaplaincy work, social work, administration and interfaith dialogue. The congregation's primary founder, Arnold Janssen, was a Catholic priest from Goch, Germany, near the Dutch border. Ordained a priest in 1861, he purchased land in Steyl, the Netherlands, to begin his seminary, which was dedicated in 1875 as Saint Michael the Archangel Mission House, and within a few years several seminarians, priests and brothers were being prepared for missionary service there. He founded the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters in 1889 and, with Helena Stollenwerk, he founded the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Adoration, also known as Sister Servants of the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Adoration, in 1896. He was canonized in 2003 by Pope John Paul II, on the basis of his miraculous healing, after prayers to Janssen, of a Filipino teenager who had suffered a serious head wound and was not expected to recover. The Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters are a Roman Catholic religious institute of contemplative cloistered nuns, who are sometimes known as the Pink Sisters because of their rose-colored habits. The congregation and the religious institute are appropriate for this category.

 

 

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