Maria Ratisbonne
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Maria Alphonse Ratisbonne was a Catholic priest, visionary and missionary. Born in 1814 in Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine to a wealthy family of Jewish bankers By 1842 he had completely lost his faith. It is claimed he had been betrothed to the daughter of his oldest brother before she could marry, despite strictures against such inbreeding in Judaism. It is reported that Ratisbonne entered upon a pleasure trip to the Orient, and had become a radical atheist and Catholic-hater when his brother Theodor converted. During this trip, he was converted to Catholicism by a miraculous apparition of the Blessed Virgin at the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte in Rome. He assisted his brother Maria Theodor Ratisbonne in founding a sisterhood of Our Lady of Sion in 1843 and was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1847. He left the Jesuit order and transplanted the Sisters of Sion to Jerusalem in 1855, desirous to convert jews, built convents and orphanages for them, and worked as a missionary among Jews and Muslims in the region the rest of his life. He died at Ain Karim near Jerusalem, on 6 May, 1884.
