At Getafe near Madrid in Spain, Blessed Faustino Míguez, religious of the Order of the Clerics Regular of the Pious Schools, who, raised to the priesthood, devoted himself wholly to the work of teaching, attaining a great reputation as a teacher and as an expert in the natural sciences, while diligent in pastoral zeal, and founded the Congregation of the Daughters of the Divine Shepherdess.
Lifespan: 1831–1925
Beatified: 25 October 1998 by Pope John Paul II
Canonized: 15 October 2017 by Pope Francis, St. Peter’s Square, Rome
Memoria liturgica: 8 March
More than fifty years devoted to education. The school was his place of encounter with the Lord, whom he served and loved in children.
Life and Works
Faustino Míguez was born on 25 March 1831 at Xamirás, a small village in Galicia belonging to the parish of Acebedo del Río, in the Province and Diocese of Orense. He was baptized in the church of San Jorge the day after his birth and given the name Manuel. He was the fourth child of Benito Míguez and María González.
He was blessed to live and grow up in a family environment filled with affection, rooted in a simple yet genuine and deep faith. The home was for him the school that laid the foundations of love in his life, and there he absorbed one of the defining threads of his future spirituality: love for Mary.
He received his first lessons at the village school, and at the age of seventeen left home to continue his studies at the parochial school of the Shrine of Our Lady of Miracles in Orense. From the first he showed himself an intelligent and diligent student. His encounter at the Shrine of Miracles with a Piarist priest stirred in his heart the call to be an apostle to children and young people, and to become both priest and teacher. Manuel was thus won over by Saint Joseph Calasanz and his work.
After three years he left Galicia for Madrid, overcoming his parents’ resistance — they had other plans for him. He entered the Piarist novitiate at the College of San Fernando in Madrid on 5 December 1850. This decisive new chapter in his life coincided with a change of name: from this moment he would be known as Faustino of the Incarnation.
He made his solemn profession of vows on 16 January 1853. He completed the scientific, philosophical, and theological studies of Piarist formation and was ordained to the priesthood on 19 March 1856. In November 1857 he was sent to the first Piarist foundation in Guanabacoa, Cuba. He was the youngest of the fourteen religious who formed the community, drawn from the four Piarist provinces of Spain.
Cuba broadened Father Faustino’s horizons. His confrères helped him to know the Piarist schools more deeply. The new customs and ways of life taught him the importance of respect for different realities. He taught in the teacher-training program to form schoolmasters. There he learned the therapeutic uses of plants, and experience taught him the importance of practical methods in teaching. These two activities had a decisive influence on his scientific and pedagogical vocation.
He was subsequently sent to various communities: Getafe (1861–1868), where he served as director of boarding students; Celanova (1868–1869), where he fought for freedom of teaching; Sanlúcar de Barrameda (1869–1873), where the municipal authorities entrusted him with the analysis of the city’s water supply; El Escorial (1873–1875), where he served as librarian of the Royal Library; Monforte de Lemos (1875–1879), where he was Rector; Sanlúcar de Barrameda (1879–1888), where he founded the Institute of Calasanzian Sisters, Daughters of the Divine Shepherdess; and Getafe (1888–1925), where he spent the final years of his life.
Faustino Míguez dedicated more than fifty years of his life to education. He taught Latin, history, algebra, rhetoric, geography, agriculture, physics and chemistry, natural history, hygiene, and French, excelling above all in the natural sciences. To make learning easier and the content of the sciences more accessible to his pupils, he gave his teaching a practical orientation and wrote simple books in the form of lively and engaging dialogues — Nociones de Historia Natural, Nociones de Física Terrestre, and Diálogo sobre las láminas de Historia Natural — an active pedagogy designed to sustain children’s attention and develop their powers of observation.
Wherever he went, he proved a great educator and champion of freedom of teaching, convinced that education is the surest path to renewing society and achieving human happiness.
The school was for him the place of encounter with the Lord, whom he served and loved in his pupils; he treated them with kindness, respect, and affection, seeking to know each one individually and to pursue their greatest good. His love and closeness were shown in a particular way in his care for the most needy, the weak, and the sick.
His love and dedication to scientific inquiry were always closely united to his vocation as an educator. From an early age he was drawn with enthusiasm to botany and the study of the healing properties of plants, in which, he believed, Providence had placed the remedy for human ailments. He pursued this work as a service to humanity, believing that by developing specific remedies he was helping to free mankind from pain and illness. He himself gave voice to this conviction:
I profess as much love for science as for suffering humanity… for, following the example of the Divine Master, I must watch first and foremost over the health of the soul, but I am also bound to concern myself, according to my strength, with that of the body.
During his second stay in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, open and attentive to the needs of the society of his day, he discovered the situation of neglect and ignorance in which women lived, and the need for someone to guide them, from childhood, along the path of human and Christian advancement and to open before them horizons of culture and faith.
Certain that the inspiration he felt in his heart came from God, and with the approval of his Superior General and the Archbishop of Seville, on 2 January 1885 he founded the Institute of Calasanzian Sisters, Daughters of the Divine Shepherdess, at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in the province of Cádiz.
This Congregation, which follows the pedagogical approach of Joseph Calasanz, was founded for the education of girls. It offers an integral education embracing the formation of body, intellect, and heart — a complete promotion of woman, given her importance and influence in the family and in society.
Father Faustino died on 8 March 1925, at the age of ninety-four, in Getafe, where he had spent the final thirty-seven years of his life.
In his homily at the beatification, Pope John Paul II said:
In the school and in the street, in the confessional and in the laboratory, Father Faustino always showed forth Christ who welcomes, who forgives, and who encourages. His luminous example — compounded of prayer, study, and apostolate — lives on in the witness of his daughters and of the many educators who work with courage and enthusiasm to impress the image of Jesus upon the minds and hearts of the young.
Pope John Paul II, beatification homily, 25 October 1998
Progress of the Cause
a) In View of the Beatification
The Informative Process in the Diocese of Madrid was opened on 31 January 1953 and closed on 6 December 1954. On 7 January 1982 the Decree on the Introduction of the Cause was promulgated, with a dispensation from the Apostolic Process.
On 26 January 1990 the Special Congress of Theological Consultors on the virtues of the Servant of God was held with a positive outcome. On 20 October 1992 the Ordinary Session of Cardinals and Bishops acknowledged his heroic virtues, and on 21 December of that year His Holiness Pope John Paul II promulgated the corresponding decree.
In July 1994 the diocesan inquiry into an alleged miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable on behalf of a young man was conducted in Buenos Aires. On 14 June 1997 the Medical Council declared the healing scientifically inexplicable. On 3 November 1997 the Special Congress of Theological Consultors was held with a favorable outcome. On 17 March 1998 the Cardinals and Bishops in Ordinary Session declared that the healing was a true miracle wrought through the intercession of the Venerable Servant of God. On 6 April 1998 Pope John Paul II promulgated the Decree on the miracle. On 25 October 1998, in St. Peter’s Square, the same Supreme Pontiff proclaimed him Blessed.
b) In View of the Canonization
From 17 July 2008 to 17 April 2009 the diocesan inquiry into the alleged miraculous healing of a woman was conducted at the Curia of Santiago, Chile. On 10 December 2015 the Medical Council declared the healing scientifically inexplicable. On 29 September 2016 the Special Congress of Theological Consultors gave a positive judgment on the alleged miraculous event. On 6 December 2016 the Cardinals and Bishops in Ordinary Session acknowledged that the woman’s healing must be attributed to the intercession of the Blessed. On 22 December 2016 Pope Francis authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the Decree on the miracle, which had occurred in 2003 through the intercession of Blessed Faustino Míguez.