Veronika Theresia Rácková was born to a small Slovak Catholic family at Šaľa in southwestern Slovakia, then under Communist Czechoslovak rule. She trained and qualified as a physician at Bratislava in the early 1980s (her religious vocation could not be openly pursued during the Communist regime), and only entered the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters (SSpS — the women's branch of the Steyl Mission family founded by St. Arnold Janssen in 1889) after the 1989 Velvet Revolution.
She took religious vows in 1992 and was sent to the African missions, serving over a decade in Nigeria before being assigned in 2010 to the new South Sudanese mission of the SSpS. She founded and from 2010 directed the St. Bakhita Medical Centre at Yei in the Central Equatoria state of South Sudan — the only functioning Catholic maternity-and-pediatrics medical facility in the southern half of the country. The center delivered an average of two hundred babies per month and ran an associated outreach to indigenous communities in the bush.
On the evening of May 16, 2016, returning to the convent after a late emergency obstetric call, her car was attacked by gunmen of the South Sudan People's Defence Forces (the government army, then engaged in the ethnic-civil-war reprisals of the long South Sudanese civil war 2013–18). She was shot four times in the abdomen at point-blank range. She was airlifted to Nairobi but died of multiple-organ failure four days later, May 20, 2016, at sixty. The cause for her beatification was formally opened by the Diocese of Yei on May 16, 2024 — the eighth anniversary of the attack — making her one of the few Slovak Catholic Servants of God of the 21st century.