In November 2015, Jayne Miller was driving in Anoka County when she started to have a heart attack. She pulled over into a parking lot and called 911, as her friend sat in shock in the passenger seat. As she started to slip into unconsciousness, she cried out to Sister Annella Zervas — a long-dead Benedictine sister she was on her way to central Minnesota to celebrate.
“We were crying out, praying, ‘Sister Annella, please help!’ … My last words were, I think, ‘Oh Sister Annella, please help me,” recalled Miller, a parishioner of Epiphany in Coon Rapids at the time. “And I passed away there, and they brought me back, in the back of an ambulance.”
She said her heart stopped and she couldn’t be revived, and for 15 minutes of the ambulance ride she was without vital signs. When Miller opened her eyes, she shocked the paramedic, who had expected to call her DOA when they arrived at the hospital, she recounted. Medical tests showed nothing wrong with her, baffling the doctor.
“I know I had a miracle,” Miller said. And she attributes it to the intercession of Sister Annella.
Miller, 65, is far from alone in crediting Sister Annella with a healing. Within a few years of her death from a debilitating skin disease in 1926, hundreds of people reported healings after praying for the religious sister’s intercession. Stories of her sanctity spread internationally, parents named daughters in her honor, and two small books were written about her suffering and holy death.
In November 2024, Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston presented Sister Annella’s story to his fellow bishops and gained their vote of support in pursuing an inquiry into a cause for Sister Annella’s beatification, calling her “an apostle of suffering for our day.”
After months of gathering information about Sister Annella — including Miller’s testimony — and the approval of the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, Bishop Cozzens plans to celebrate a Mass Oct. 9 at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Crookston to officially open Sister Annella’s cause.
Should her cause progress to canonization, Sister Annella may be Minnesota’s first saint.
Sister Annella was born Anna Cordelia Zervas in Moorhead on April 7, 1900, the second of six children. Her father was a German immigrant who worked briefly as a butcher in Minneapolis before establishing a meat shop in Moorhead. There he met and married a French-Canadian woman who had considered religious life. Both were devout Catholics whose family life revolved around the local parish.
Anna was a happy girl who demonstrated spiritual maturity at an early age and made sacrifices to attend daily Mass as a young teenager. At age 15, she expressed interest in joining the Benedictine Sisters at St. Joseph, who taught at her school. That year, she entered the community’s novitiate, and in 1918 she was given the habit and religious name Sister Mary Annella.
According to an early biographer, upon learning her name, her mother remarked that there was no St. Annella. “Then I will have to be the first one,” her daughter replied.
Sister Annella was a happy sister “known for her seriousness, musical talent, sense of humor, conscientiousness, popularity, artistic abilities, humble and childlike disposition, politeness and kindness,” according to a biography on the website of the Sister Annella Guild (sisterannella.org), which works to advance her cause for sainthood.
Sister Annella made perpetual vows in 1922 and was assigned to teach music in Bismarck, North Dakota. The following year, she began to experience several physical afflictions, including stomach pain and an excruciating skin condition that reportedly disgusted her nurses. She ultimately moved home to be cared for by her family, who sought her treatment in Minneapolis and at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, but her illness eluded long-term relief.
“Despite her severe physical suffering, which included violent chills, high temperatures, and painful attacks of itching, scratching, and weeping, her mental faculties always remained intact. The pus-like discharge from the skin disease had a sharp, biting, and decayed odor. Her frail body exfoliated between a pint and a quart a day of skin. At one point, she existed on almost no food,” according to the Guild.
Despite this, Sister Annella remained cheerful, selfless and docile to God, and understood her suffering to be redemptive. When her suffering grew intense, she would pray, “Yes, Lord, send me more pain, but give me strength to bear it!”
At one point, her desperate parents wrote to Brother (now saint) Andre Bessette, a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross in Montreal known for holiness and miraculous cures attributed to his intercession. According to the Guild, Brother Andre’s response was mysterious and profound: “She is to suffer for the whole Church.” Her biographers suggest Sister Annella may have also experienced spiritual attacks in addition to her physical pain.
Sister Annella died Aug. 14, 1926, at her childhood home, surrounded by family. Her funeral was at the Church of St. Mary in Moorhead, and her remains were transported to St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph and interred in its cemetery.
Devotion to her as a holy intercessor was immediate. In 1929, St. Paul Daily News reported of Sister Annella that “there have been hundreds of cures effected, thousands seek relief at her grave, and thousands write for information about her life.”
As years passed, however, personal accounts devolved into lore — especially at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, adjacent to the monastery’s cemetery, where stories of Sister Annella’s grave remaining free of snow in winter were circulating as early as the 1940s. But the compelling story of Sister Annella’s heroic suffering receded to a footnote in history.
Teresa McCarthy, 62, remembers hearing the legend of a nun’s snowless grave 50 years ago from her older sister, a St. Benedict student, but it was not until she took a job at Epiphany in Coon Rapids over a decade ago that she encountered Sister Annella though copies of a 1929 biography, “An Apostle of Suffering in our Day” by Father Joseph Kreuter, a Benedictine priest.
In 2018, McCarthy visited Sister Annella’s grave for the first time to pray for a friend whose husband was sick. (It was winter, and there was snow on Sister Annella’s grave.) The experience fostered an affection for Sister Annella, and she endeavored to learn more about her.
And that led her to Patrick Norton.
A painter who lives in Avon, Minnesota, Norton is hugely — and some would argue single-handedly — responsible for reviving the contemporary interest in Sister Annella that led to a cause for her canonization. He has lived his whole life with a powerful story linking him to a saint — Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity rescued him as an infant in Mumbai, India, where he may have encountered the saint herself — but he also experienced what he believes to be an encounter with Sister Annella.
In 2010, the devout Catholic was painting lampposts near a grotto in the monastery cemetery when a religious sister in a full, old-fashioned habit approached him, seemingly out of nowhere. She seemed aware of his strong Marian devotion, and they chatted as he continued to paint. Then she said goodbye. He looked over his shoulder but did not see her on any of the paths that led from the area. He thought the incident was odd, but he didn’t give it more thought at the time.
However, not long after, he was at Eucharistic adoration when he ran into a local writer who had unearthed research about Sister Annella and interest in her sainthood cause from decades prior. That reporter shared a photo of Sister Annella, and Norton recognized her large, striking blue eyes.
He began learning everything he could about her and passionately took on the mission of sharing her story. He reprinted Father Kreuter’s booklet, posted on YouTube, met with bishops, and when in Rome in 2016 for Mother Teresa’s canonization, passed a packet of information to a Vatican official who promised to get it to Pope Francis.
He also organized monthly gatherings at Sister Annella’s grave. That’s where Jayne Miller and her friend were headed when she suffered — and recovered from — her heart attack.
Those gatherings have been a source of inspiration to many, including Father Dan Tracy, associate pastor of St. Patrick Parish in Hudson, Wisconsin. From 2015 to 2017, prior to entering seminary, he served as a missionary for the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or FOCUS, at St. John’s University in Collegeville. The men’s university has a close relationship to the nearby women’s College of St. Benedict.
In 2016, Father Tracy committed to praying at Sister Annella’s grave each Sunday for the campuses’ students. He recalls that time as consistently peaceful and spiritually fruitful and he knew students who were moved by Sister Annella’s witness.
“Sister Annella’s suffering is a testament to the power of suffering,” he said. “We need to see saints who suffered. We obviously need to look at our Lord on the cross. But, in many ways, the more witnesses to suffering that are there … the more opportunities we have to embrace the cross.”
While Sister Annella played an important role in his life while in FOCUS, Father Tracy is now zeroed in on advancing the cause of Blessed Solanus Casey, a Capuchin Franciscan who received his first Communion at St. Patrick in Hudson, he said.
Father Tracy was responsible, however, for having introduced Sister Annella to Helen Healy, who developed a devotion to the young sister. When one of her daughters was suffering long-term effects of a sports concussion, Healy brought her to Sister Annella’s grave. At first, her daughter’s suffering increased — as Sister Annella’s had — but then it subsided, and she regained full health.
“I see her (Sister Annella) as a beautiful soul, and how she suffered with so much grace,” said Healy, a parishioner of Holy Name of Jesus in Medina and member of the Sister Annella Guild. “And I think, how do I handle things with grace in my own life, even adversity?”
Healy, 59, also shared her growing love for Sister Annella with her brother, Bishop Cozzens, then an auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis. His 2021 appointment to Crookston — the diocese where Sister Annella was born — made it possible for him to initiate an inquiry into her life.
“Her story touches the heart of our Catholic faith, teaching us that even the greatest suffering, when united with Christ, becomes a powerful means of redemption and intimacy with God, enriching our understanding of what it means to be fully human,” he told his fellow bishops in November while introducing her cause.
Sister Annella’s grace amid intense physical and spiritual pain may be a much-needed example for today’s suffering-adverse culture, Healy said, which is why she sees Sister Annella’s story parallelling that of Michelle Duppong, a young woman from North Dakota who similarly fixed her eyes on Jesus and cared for others amid horrible suffering from cancer. She died at age 31 in 2015. In 2022, Bishop David Kagan of Bismarck, North Dakota, opened a cause for Duppong’s beatification.
In Crookston, objects that belonged to Sister Annella will be exhibited ahead of the Oct. 9 Mass. Some were handed down in the Zervas family to the care of Joan Zervas, Sister Annella’s niece and a Twin Cities resident. She died in 2016, but not before meeting Norton through mutual friends, Kathy and David Rennie, parishioners of Holy Family in St. Louis Park. Zervas entrusted those items to Norton, now 63, who gave them to the Crookston Diocese to help spread devotion. They include letters, photos, watches and rosaries, and the candle that burned at her bedside when she died.
Kathie Rennie, 80, has her own devotion to Sister Annella that is rooted in her childhood in St. Joseph, where she took piano lessons from Sister DePazzi Zervas — Sister Annella’s biological sister and fellow Benedictine. (A third Zervas sister, Sister Ignatia, also joined the Benedictines and is buried in St. Paul’s Monastery Cemetery in Maplewood.)
Like others, Rennie has joined Norton for prayer events at Sister Annella’s grave. Two more are scheduled in 2025, on Sept. 21 and Oct. 19. The Guild’s website also lists dates for 2026.
“I’m trying to promote her here, let people know about her,” she said. “People are amazed when they read her story.”
In Coon Rapids, McCarthy’s devotion to Sister Annella continues to deepen. She asked a former Epiphany colleague, artist Bernadette Gockowski, to paint Sister Annella’s portrait as part of a series she did on modern saints. Although a beautification cause had yet to be open, Gockowski painted her and was indeed struck by her life and its relatability, despite her extraordinary circumstances.
“If you read quickly, her story is ‘young, perfect girl becomes perfect nun, suffers a lot and dies young.’ End of story,” said Gockowski, who now lives in Somerset, Wisconsin, but maintains strong Twin Cities ties. “But I’ve read more in-depth commentary that says she tended towards extreme emotional sensitivity, homesickness, anxiety and more.”
Now living in Florida, Miller hopes that Sister Annella will one day be beatified and canonized, but she is convinced of her sainthood now. “It would give hope to a lot of people, especially in Minnesota,” she said.
Sister Annella’s witness also reminds her that to encounter a saint, “you don’t have to live in Rome or Italy,” she added. “You can be in St. Joseph, Minnesota.”
STEPS TO CANONIZATION
When the Church canonizes a person a saint, it recognizes that he or she is in heaven, is worthy of emulation and can intercede on behalf of the living. A person can be recognized as a saint for martyrdom or extraordinary virtue.
A cause for sainthood includes a diocesan and a Roman phase. During the diocesan phase, the person’s life and writings are examined and documented under the care of the local bishop. That documentation is sent to the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Causes of Saints for the Roman phase, during which the documents are reviewed.
If found convincing, the dicastery’s leaders present the cause to the pope, who may issue a decree stating that the person lived a virtuous life, granting him or her the title “venerable.”
Usually, for a person named “venerable” to progress to beatification, a miracle must be attributed to him or her – often a healing that defies medical explanation by a team of experts. A second miracle is necessary for canonization.
ANOTHER MINNESOTA SAINT?
Sister Annella Zervas is not the only Minnesotan being examined for possible beatification and canonization. The Diocese of Duluth is discerning the opening of a cause for Msgr. Joseph Buh (1833-1922), a Slovenian missionary to northeast Minnesota.
Beginning in 1864, he established 57 parishes and later served as the diocese’s vicar general. Meanwhile, he focused special attention on Native Americans and the Iron Range’s Slovenian immigrants, for whom he established the first Slovenian newspaper in the U.S.
“His extraordinary ministry was characterized by a profound commitment to the spiritual and physical well-being of those he served,” states a biography on the Duluth Diocese’s website.
On June 9, Bishop Daniel Felton of Duluth celebrated a Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary for the “translation” of Msgr. Buh’s remains — which were exhumed in summer 2024 — to the cathedral’s St. Joseph side altar.
There are currently 11 canonized American saints.
