Marie Alphonsine Danil Ghattas

Sultaneh Danil Ghattas was born in Jerusalem in 1843 into an Arab Catholic family of nineteen children. Entering the Sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition at fourteen, she taught at Bethlehem and Jaffa. There she saw what the congregations come from Europe did not: Arab girls, poor and often illiterate, were admitted nowhere, and nobody taught them in their own language. In 1880, with the priest Yousef Tannous, she founded the Sisters of the Rosary of Jerusalem — the first Arab congregation in the Holy Land, whose sisters spoke Arabic and taught in Arabic. The institute spread across the region. She died at Ein Karem in 1927 and was canonised by Pope Francis in 2015, together with another Palestinian, Mariam Baouardy.