Editor’s note: As the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, Catholic historian Reba Luiken is devoting her columns to stories about women — some well-known and others less so — who have impacted its history.
Motherhood was the primary vocation for Therese Geuer Mueller. The holder of a doctorate in economics and sociology, Mueller preferred to be addressed as Mrs. Franz Mueller. She resisted outside employment and restricted her writing to the evenings after her five children were in bed, at least while they were young. This experience with motherhood and as a wife became the chief gift she shared as she became active in helping Americans bring the liturgy into their homes in the 1940s and 1950s.
Mueller was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1905. After completing her graduate studies, she married Franz Mueller in 1930. At the time, he was an assistant at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Cologne. Together, they became active in the Catholic youth movement in Germany. Adolf Hitler made it illegal for Catholics to hold university positions in Germany, so Franz Mueller accepted a position at St. Louis University in St. Louis in 1936. Mueller followed her husband to the United States a year later with their three young daughters.
American Catholics were fascinated by the Muellers’ experiences with liturgy in Germany, and they were quickly asked to develop a lecture series on the liturgical year and then a publication. Mueller agreed, despite her concerns about her English skills. In her first article, she wrote about a meaningful baptismal garment that would grow with the child through future sacraments. This was just the beginning of her work integrating liturgy into motherhood in a practical way.
Franz Mueller accepted a new job at the College of St. Thomas, now the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul in 1940, and Mueller continued her work adapting liturgy to the home. Her most famous contribution was the Advent wreath. Mueller was dismayed by the commercial nature of Christmas and introduced the German Advent wreath tradition to refocus attention on the birth of Jesus. In Germany, red was the traditional color of Advent candles, but a priest friend suggested that she update the colors to purple and rose to match the liturgical vestments. Before Mueller, Advent wreaths had died out in German communities in America, but now they are widely popular.
Mueller ultimately decided to work part-time as a teacher of sociology and economics at the then-College of St. Thomas and the College of St. Catherine, now St. Catherine University, also in St. Paul. She also spoke regularly on the topic of sacramental marriage for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’ speaker’s bureau. Again, speaking from her own experience, she emphasized that marriage was a vocation. In parishes across Minnesota and beyond, she wrote in the newspaper Our Sunday Visitor, “We married people must strive to realize the constant and lasting presence of God in our homes … He Himself is with us for help and advice.” Her other message was that parents should continue to teach their children about religion at home and in daily life, rather than leaving this work to Catholic schools. She had lived through the erasure of public religious education in Germany and wanted to prevent this same secularization in America.
Mueller lived out her life in St. Paul, walking or taking public transportation to St. Thomas, St. Catherine and Nativity of Our Lord in St. Paul because she never owned a car. She was outspoken on this topic, too, explaining to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1989, “You question whether their use is justified with the environmental damage to the air we breathe. If each family made a personal sacrifice, then things could be different.” Mueller died in 2002, having watched her daughters continue her work to share liturgy with the world.
Luiken is a Catholic and a historian with a doctorate from the University of Minnesota. She loves exploring and sharing the hidden histories that touch our lives every day.
