On the occasion of the centenary of the night commemorating the conversion to Catholicism of the Servant of God Sister Maria della Trinità, a conference was held on Saturday, February 14, accompanied by an exhibition designed to recount in a simple yet incisive way the figure of the Poor Clare who lived in Jerusalem.

A journey of crisis and conversion

Sister Maria della Trinità, born Luisa Jaques, was born into a Protestant family in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. The death of her mother during childbirth led her father to send his daughter to Switzerland, where she was raised in her aunt’s family. During that period, a profound crisis led Luisa to abandon the faith and to pronounce a harsh sentence, "God does not exist!"

At the very darkest moment, in the night between February 13 and 14, 1926, the young woman felt a presence that entered like light into her despair. Thus began a spiritual journey that would lead her to embrace Catholicism and move to the Monastery of the Poor Clares of Jerusalem.

The staging of the exhibition

The exhibition on Sister Maria della Trinità, curated in its graphic design by the young people of the Compagnia dei Tipiloschi of Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati of San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy, arose from careful work on the sources preserved in the archive of the Monastery of the Poor Clares of Jerusalem. The members of the Compagnia made available their competence and passion, creating a visual journey that weaves together historical photographs, reproductions of manuscripts, musical pieces composed or transcribed by the religious sister, and even examples of embroidery made by her.

The Compagnia dei Tipiloschi is inspired by Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati, canonized on September 7, 2025, and born in 1901 in Turin, just twenty days before Sister Maria della Trinità, an ideal twinning that unites two young people who lived in the same period and were united by a profound experience of faith.

The life of Sister Mary of the Trinity through her possessions and thoughts

The exhibition is structured in 26 panels, organized first according to a chronological and then thematic criterion, divided into the four major phases of the religious sister’s life, who passed away at only 41 years of age on June 25, 1942. The itinerary opens by recounting her childhood in South Africa, where she was born in 1901 into a Protestant missionary family. This is followed by the years spent in Switzerland.

A third section documents the period lived between Milan and Bergamo, where she lived for work reasons, until her definitive arrival in Jerusalem. The part dedicated to the Holy Land is the most extensive, photographs of the community that welcomed her are displayed, the only known image of her wearing the habit of a Poor Clare, and panels offering deeper insight into her spirituality, with particular attention to the theme of listening to the inner voice and to the vow of victimhood, understood as the highest degree of availability and non resistance to the will of God, in a profoundly Eucharistic attitude.

A further space is reserved for her talents and creativity, a great reader, musician, she played the organ, and skilled embroiderer, Sister Maria della Trinità emerges as a figure rich in artistic as well as spiritual sensitivity. For the occasion, original manuscripts and some monastic habits preserved in the archive of the monastery of Jerusalem are also displayed. This makes the exhibition not only a historical tribute, but also a direct encounter with the concrete traces of her life.