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Today’s missionary hero is Ruth Pfau, a physician-Religious Sister who devoted her skills in the mission fields of Pakistan.
Ruth Pfau was born in Leipzig, German on September 9, 1929 to Lutheran parents. She had four sisters and one brother.
During World War II, bombs destroyed her home. After the Soviet Union invaded East Germany, Ruth’s family escaped to West Germany.
In the 1950s, Ruth studied medicine at the University of Mainz and became a physician. In 1951, she was baptized as an Evangelical Protestant, but in 1953, she became a Catholic Christian.
In 1957, Ruth joined a religious congregation of women called the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in Paris, France.
In 1960, her Order sent Sr. Ruth to work in southern India. However, on her journey to India, she became stranded in Pakistan because of a problem with her passport. By chance, she visited a leper colony in Karachi, the capital of Pakistan. In the leper colony, Sr. Ruth met thousands of Pakistani lepers.
A young leper who was about her own age – 30 – touched her heart and spirit in a very special way. The young man was crawling on his hands and feet into the dispensary, acting as if this were completely normal. Sr. Ruth could not imagine that human beings could live in such conditions, crawling in the slime and dirt like a dog.
The sights and suffering Sr. Ruth saw in Karachi changed the direction of her life. Right then and there, Sr. Ruth decided to stay in Pakistan and serve the lepers. She stayed for the next 57 years.
First, Sr. Ruth joined the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Center that was opened in 1956 in the Karachi slums and named after the founder of the nuns who ran it. Soon, the Center became the hub of 157 medical centers that treated tens of thousands of Pakistani lepers.
When scientists discovered the treatment for leprosy, known as Hansen’s Disease, Sr. Ruth and other physicians began to treat patients with tuberculosis, blindness, and other diseases caused by land mines in war-torn Afghanistan.
Sr. Ruth Pfau saw a problem, and she knew that as a physician, she could use her skills to help solve the problem. During her time serving the lepers of Pakistan, Sr. Ruth wrote some books about her experiences. One of them, To Light a Candle, was translated into English.
Sr. Ruth rejected the word “retirement” from her vocabulary. She wrote, “I don’t use the word ‘retirement.’ It sounds as if you had completed everything, as if life was over and the world was in order.” Sr. Ruth died peacefully on August 10, 2017 in Karachi, Pakistan. The government of Pakistan gave her a state funeral, the first ever for a non-Muslim person, in its history.
Sr. Ruth received many honors in her life, and she became known as the “Mother Teresa of Pakistan.” Respected by both Muslims and Christians, the government of Pakistan announced that it was changing the name of the Civil Hospital Karachi to the Dr. Ruth Pfau Hospital in to acknowledge “selfless services of the late social servant.”
