Feliksa Magdalena Kozłowska ( ), known by the religious name Maria Franciszka and the epithet "", was a Polish Christian mystic and visionary who founded a movement of renewal in the Roman Catholic church in the Russian Partition of Poland. It was to follow the simplicity of the life of Mary, mother of Jesus. Early in the 20th-century, the movement was excommunicated and became an autonomous church in fellowship with the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands. In 1935 it split in two and became the Old Catholic Mariavite Church and the Catholic Mariavite Church. Both denominations were part of a single schism from the Catholic Church which declared it as heretical in 1906. Early life Feliksa Kozłowska was born in Wieliczna near Węgrów, into an impoverished Szlachta family, bearing the Nalecz coat-of-arms. She was eight months old when her father, Jakub, died in the January Uprising. She was raised by her mother, and paternal step-grandparents, called Pułaski. They lived with those relatives first in Czerwonka węgrowska, and later in Baczki. After home tuition, she graduated from a high school in Warsaw, speaking fluent Russian, English and French. Her first job was as a governess to the family of a general. By all accounts she was an attractive and accomplished woman who rejected at least one offer of marriage. She planned instead to join the enclosed Visitation Sisters in Warsaw. However, due to tsarist regulations relating to religious orders, it proved impossible. At the age of nineteen she entered the recently formed "Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Afflicted", founded by Honorat Koźmiński - (a serial founder of religious communities), and whose purpose was to care for the sick. Three years later, she evinced the need for more contemplation and a less busy setting. With permission from fr. Koźmiński, she left the Franciscan sisters. On 8 September 1887 she formed on Koźmiński's advice, with five other women, a covert religious community in the ancient city of Płock and went to live with them. They followed Franciscan spirituality and supported themselves with embroidery of church vestments. The income was very modest resulting in a relatively strict regime, abstaining from all meat and fish. She became superior of the new community, called the Congregation of Sisters of the Poor of Saint Mother Clare and adopted the religious names of Maria Franciszka. The congregation followed the Rule of Saint Francis and added