At Valencia in Spain, Blessed Joanna Maria Condesa Lluch, virgin, who with a diligent love of charity and sacrifice gave herself in a humble course of labor to assisting the poor, children, and young working women, for whose protection and instruction she founded the Congregation of the Handmaids of the Immaculate Conception, Protectresses of Working Women.
Lifespan: 1862–1916
Beatified: 23 March 2003 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 16 January
Six days you shall labor and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath in honor of the Lord your God.
Ex 20:9–10
Joanna Maria Condesa Lluch was born in Valencia, Spain, on 30 March 1862, into a Christian family of good social and economic standing. She was baptized on 31 March 1862 in the church of Saint Stephen, the same church in which Saint Vincent Ferrer and Saint Louis Bertrand had been baptized. She received a careful human and Christian formation, which stood in contrast to the rationalist mentality that was quietly spreading through Valencian society of the time and giving rise to a wave of de-Christianization.
During adolescence and youth she deepened her Christian life, nourished by the religious devotions characteristic of her historical moment—above all devotion to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, to the Immaculate Conception, to Saint Joseph, and to Saint Teresa—which led her in turn to develop a growing sensitivity toward, and commitment to, those most in need.
Very early she discovered the gift of God’s love pouring abundantly into her heart (cf. Rom 5:5), and made her own the mission of receiving that gift within her life so as to become a “sanctuary of God, dwelling of the Spirit” (cf. 1 Cor 3:16). Her intense life of prayer and her constant relationship with God were the force that allowed the proper fruits of one who lives according to the Spirit to ripen in her: joy, humility, constancy, self-mastery, peace, goodness, dedication, industriousness, solidarity—faith, hope, and love. For all of this, those who knew her present her as a woman who “succeeded in living the ordinary in an extraordinary way.”
She was barely eighteen years old when she discovered that God’s will for her life was to give herself wholly, and to abandon herself entirely, to the cause of the Kingdom—through the evangelization of, and service to, women workers, with deep concern for their living and working conditions. This reality of suffering was one she observed from the carriage that carried her from Valencia to the beach at Nazaret, where her family kept a house for rest and recreation.
In 1884, after several years of difficulties and obstacles raised especially by the then-Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal Antolín Monescillo—who considered her too young to carry out the proposal she had put to him of founding a Religious Congregation—she obtained from him the necessary permission to open a house that would welcome, form, and restore dignity to the women workers who, amid the growing industrialization of the nineteenth century, were moving from the villages to the city to work in factories, where they were regarded as mere instruments of labor. The Cardinal’s words to her were: “Great is your faith and your constancy. Go and open a shelter for these women workers for whom you show such solicitude and for whom your heart feels so much affection.”
Some months later, a school for the daughters of the women workers was inaugurated in that same house, and other young women joined her project sharing the same ideals. From this moment, what she had experienced as the will of God began to take shape in her life: “I and all that is mine for the women workers.” This was no mere formula; it was the space that made possible God’s call and the response of one person, Joanna Maria Condesa Lluch.
Convinced that her work was a fruit of the Spirit and desiring that it become an ecclesial reality, she continued to press for permission to organize as a Religious Congregation, so as to follow Christ by giving her life for him in service to the women workers—a commitment that demanded exclusivity, and hence her choice to live chastity, obedience, and poverty in a radical way. Purified through trial, maintaining a serene, steadfast, and trusting spirit—“Lord, keep me firm beside your Cross”—making faith her light, hope her strength, and love her soul, she obtained diocesan approval of the Institute in 1892. The Institute grew in membership and spread into various industrial zones; in 1895 she made her Temporary Profession together with the first sisters, and in 1911 her Perpetual Profession.
Throughout all these years, her life—lived in imitation of the Immaculate Virgin—was an unconditional self-giving to the will of God, making her own Mary’s words at the Annunciation: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). These words became for her the key to her spirituality and a way of life, to the point that she described herself as “handmaid of the Handmaid of the Lord” and gave name and meaning to the Congregation she founded.
On 16 January 1916, Mother Joanna Maria Condesa Lluch passed to the contemplation of God’s face for all eternity, attaining that longing for holiness she had so often expressed to the sisters in these words: “To be holy in heaven, without raising dust on earth.” This expression reveals how her life unfolded according to the Spirit of Christ Jesus, joining the most sublime of experiences—intimacy with God—to the commitment that young women workers might also attain this sublime vocation: to be image and likeness of the Creator. She was described by one of the Theological Consultors who studied her virtues as a “biblical woman, full of courage in her choices and evangelical in her works.”
The Institute, sustained by the firm will of its Foundress, received temporary pontifical approval from His Holiness Pope Pius XI on 14 April 1937, and definitive approval from His Holiness Pope Pius XII on 27 January 1947. The diocesan opening of the Cause of Canonization of Mother Joanna Maria took place in Valencia in 1953. Her heroic virtues were approved in 1997, and on 5 July 2002, in the presence of His Holiness Pope John Paul II, the Decree approving a miracle attributed to her intercession was promulgated.