The Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Elizabeth (CSSE) was founded by an association of young ladies established by Dorothea Klara Wolff, in connection with the sisters, Mathilde and Maria Merkert, and Franziska Werner, in Nysa (Prussian Silesia), to tend in their own homes, without compensation, helpless sick persons who could not or would not be received into the hospitals.
Without adopting any definite rule, they led a community life and wore a common dress, a brown woollen habit with a grey bonnet.
As their work was soon recognized and praised everywhere, and as new members continually applied for admission, their spiritual advisers sought to give the association some sort of religious organization.
Great difficulties arose, and the attempt failed, principally through the resistance of the foundresses, who did not wish to abandon their original plan of itinerant nursing.
[1] On September 4, 1859, Bishop of Wrocław Heinrich Förster gave diocesan approval for the association and recognized it as a congregation of the Catholic Church.
State recognition, with the grant of a corporate charter, was obtained by the confraternity on 25 May 1864, under the title, "Catholic Charitable Institute of St. Elizabeth", through the mediation of the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William, subsequent Emperor of Germany, who had observed the beneficent activity of the sisters on the battlefields of Denmark.
Even though its Lithuanian members totaled a meager fifteen sisters, the congregation to expand the scope of their charitable activities in Lithuania by starting an orphanage in Jurbarkas and founding a hospital in Švėkšna.