(OSV News) — The canonization cause for Ruth V. K. Pakaluk — a Massachusetts wife, mother, convert and pro-life activist — has been suspended, according to the cause’s leaders.

In a brief statement posted to its website, the Ruth V.K. Pakaluk Foundation said it “has suspended its petition to the Bishop of Worcester to formally open Ruth’s cause of beatification and canonization.”

The foundation added, “This decision is based on considerations that extend beyond Ruth herself, her life, or her witness. Ultimately, the matter rests in God’s hands and will proceed according to the judgment of the Church.”

The Vatican had given the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts, permission to proceed with the cause in late September 2025, with Pakaluk named a “Servant of God,” the title given to a candidate for a sainthood cause.

Pakaluk, who died at age 41 in 1998 after a lengthy battle with cancer, was a mother of seven (losing her son Thomas to sudden infant death syndrome) and an ardent pro-life advocate. 

Couple married while both were students at Harvard

A native of New Jersey, she met and married her future husband, Michael Pakaluk — now an economist and philosopher at The Catholic University of America in Washington — while both were students at Harvard University. Regarding themselves at the time as atheists, with Michael Pakaluk a lapsed Catholic, they embraced the faith shortly after their graduation.

Following the birth of their first child, Ruth Pakaluk became involved in the pro-life movement. She was asked to join the board of Massachusetts Citizens for Life and later served as its president. 

Pakaluk also developed an extensive public speaking schedule, while living out an active prayer and catechetical ministry at her parish, St. Paul Cathedral in Worcester, and raising her family.

Diagnosed with breast cancer, Pakaluk conceived her seventh child shortly after completing chemotherapy, giving birth to daughter Anna Sophia in 1993. Later that same year, her cancer was found to have spread extensively.

Amid treatments, she tended to family and continued parish ministry

Amid subsequent treatment, Pakaluk tended to her family while continuing her parish ministry and pro-life activism. By 1998, she was given just months to live. Nonetheless, she completed the annual March for Life in Washington that year, collapsing immediately afterward and requiring hospitalization.

She died Sept. 23, 1998, and is buried in Notre Dame Cemetery in Worcester.

Following the Vatican’s 2025 approval to proceed with her sainthood cause, Michael Pakaluk said he had prayed for the cause to open, but did not credit any one person with initiating it.

“Lots of people have spoken about it … believed a cause should open up,” he told The Catholic Free Press, Worcester’s diocesan news outlet

He sad he had “always been happy to cooperate” with anyone pursuing the cause

Pakaluk said he viewed his late wife’s canonization cause through the lens of the Second Vatican Council, which set forth a pattern of holiness for laypeople. As a wife, mother, friend and engaged citizen, Ruth corresponded to that in all respects, he said, while noting she had “a kind of countercultural streak” and a love for rock music.

Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News. Follow her on X @GinaJesseReina. Tanya Connor, senior reporter and photographer at The Catholic Free Press, news outlet of the Diocese of Worcester, contributed to this article.