Saint of the Month: Augusta Gudhart

Some weeks ago I received a phone call from a neighbor named Karen who needed help obtaining a wheelchair. I sent out a few emails and, by golly, somebody in my parish had a wheelchair they were happy to donate. I wouldn’t have thought more about this except that Karen proudly informed me that she was the great niece of a once-legendary but now mostly forgotten heroine of Lutheran ministry named Augusta Gudhart.

Augusta Gudhart, RN was born in Eastern Europe (whether Poland or Russia I can’t say. The data is inexact) in 1884 and came with her family to America in 1900. She graduated from nursing school in Pittsburgh in 1910 and in 1912 she heeded a call to join the Lutheran Oriental Mission and set out for the Middle East to bring aid, medicine, and Christianity to the Kurdish people.

I suspect Augusta was an old-fashioned type missionary who sprinkled her compassionate aid to orphans and others with liberal doses of doctrine in an attempt to save souls from what she feared was the pitfall of Islam. Today’s missionaries are a bit more open-minded in their thinking, dispensing compassion while respecting the religious traditions of those who receive it. In Augusta’s day, however, Lutherans and others burned with a zeal to make converts. They must’ve been successful as small pockets of Christians remain in the Middle East today, descendants of those who first received the faith from American and European missionaries.

Augusta, along with her fellow American Lutheran missionaries, established an orphanage and clinic in an area in the Ottoman Empire, most likely part of modern-day Iraq. For over two decades off and on she taught, nursed, delivered babies, tended wounds, and loved Kurdish people. She often faced privation and, upon occasion, terrible danger.

Many of the mission’s efforts were frustrated by the violence and changing power structures of the First World War. In October of 1921, the town where Augusta served, Souj-Boulagh, was besieged by Kurdish marauders who believed it to be an outpost of Persian troops. Augusta survived artillery shells, but encountered blood-thirsty brigands who stripped her of her clothing and beat her. The mission was looted of all valuables, save those which Augusta had cleverly buried in a cellar and camouflaged with fire wood. The Lutheran pastor was shot dead and died in front of his wife. Augusta appealed to the brigand chieftain, whom she had known previously, for safety. She and a handful of other women were granted safe passage to Persia, but not before she witnessed the mass execution of Persian prisoners. Her trek to safety was accomplished largely on foot across rocky terrain.

Augusta recorded her witness of the siege of Souj-Boulagh in an article for the Atlantic Monthly in 1922 entitled “The Blood of the Martyrs.” In spite of the violence she witnessed, Augusta returned to the Middle East and served an additional eleven years. She bore no animosity towards the Kurds. She later returned to Pennsylvania and continued in her calling as a nurse and midwife well into her maturity. She died in 1985 at the age of 101.

America’s involvement in the Middle East has always been a perilous undertaking. In the current political climate, with civil war in Syria, the rise of ISIS, a far-from-stable Iraq, questions over Iran’s nuclear intentions, al Queda, Hamas, etcetera, it’s easy for us to dismiss the region as a hotbed of our enemies—barbaric, medieval fanatics bent on our destruction. For Augusta Gudhart, however, there were no enemies. There were only God’s children. She and so many like her ventured to distant lands to obey Jesus’ call to “Feed my sheep.” Her memory serves to remind us that we live on a very small planet, and our differences can never be solved at the point of a gun. She is a witness to the words of the old gospel hymn:

“For not with swords loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drums,

But deeds of love and mercy the heav’nly kingdom comes.”

You can read Augusta’s account of her ordeal at Souj-Boulagh online by clicking Augusta.