Marianne Nordström was born in 1925 in a town south of New Delhi in India. At the age of 19, she received her vocation and lived for six years in a convent in the north of England. She took her monastic vows before the vicar in Osby church in Lund on June 6, 1954 and then became the first nun in the Church of Sweden after the Reformation.
Her great life’s work was helping people on the run, and in 1964 she opened Alsike monastery, which during the 70s gave refuge to refugees. In the 90s, she became known throughout the country when the police carried out the first raid on the monastery in Knivsta. In total, there were 25 police raids on the Helgeand sisters, as Alsike’s sisters called themselves.
For UNT, colleague Sister Karin tells that she was with Sister Marianne during the last hours. Together with the two other sisters at the convent, she visited Sister Marianne at Estrid’s farm in Knivsta, where she has lived since 2019.
“It was hard to make contact, but when I started singing to her, she looked up for a moment. We ended up singing ‘In Heaven’. Then she looked up again, a tear fell on her cheek and then her chin fell down and she was gone,” sister Karin tells the newspaper.
Marianne Nordström fell asleep on June 14. She was 97 years old.
Corrected: In an earlier version of the text there was an error about sister Karin.