At Salamanca in Spain, Blessed Cándida María de Jesús (Juana Josefa Cipitria), virgin, who founded the Congregation of the Daughters of Jesus, that it might lend its helping labor to the Christian education of children.
Lifespan: 1845–1912
Beatified: 12 May 1996 by Pope John Paul II
Canonized: 17 October 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI, Saint Peter’s Square
Memoria liturgica: 9 August
“I, only for God; the greater my misery, the more I hope in the mercy of God”
“I, only for God” — that was Juana Josefa Cipitria y Barriola’s response to the wonderful gift of the first call. “Forty years of religious life, and all forty years for God” — so she would say, and feel herself “most peacefully at peace,” when another call, the last, invited her to union with God: definitive and forever joyful.
These two expressions frame her entire life — a life that began at dawn on 31 May 1845 in the hamlet of Berrospe, in Andoain (Guipúzcoa), Spain, and reached its close on 9 August 1912 in Salamanca. On 8 December 1871, Juana Josefa, as Foundress Mother Cándida María de Jesús, had begun in Salamanca itself the founding of a new Congregation for the Christian education of children and young people, and for the promotion of women.
On the very day of her birth, the eldest child of Juan Miguel, a weaver, and of María Jesús received Baptism in the parish church of Saint Martin. On 5 November 1848 she also received the sacrament of Confirmation. At the age of ten, she received her First Communion in the parish of Santa María in Tolosa. That First Communion left in her such joy at the encounter with Jesus that, when at the hour of her death she was asked whether she wished to receive Him one last time, she replied with great vigour: “What? Do I wish it? Not once, but a thousand times, were it possible!”
Her simple circumstances, her limited intellectual formation, the lack of financial means and material support at the outset of the foundation and throughout her life, make plain that it was a trusting response to God’s call that made her a fitting instrument for the mission for which she had been chosen. By opening schools for children and girls of every social class — at a time when aspiring to such integration seemed utopian — and Sunday schools for working women and domestic servants, Mother Cándida placed the Congregation of the Daughters of Jesus within the pastoral project of the Church of her day: a Church suffering, in the 19th century, from the unchecked advance of liberalism in Spain, as was happening throughout Europe.
Her spirituality drew nourishment from the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. With the collaboration of Father Herranz, S.J., she wrote the Constitutions for her religious family. Wishing to give stability to her work, she traveled to Rome to obtain pontifical approval, which was granted by Pope Leo XIII on 18 September 1902.