At Tortosa in Spain, Saint Rosa Francisca María of the Sorrows (María Rosa) Molas y Vallvé, virgin, who transformed an association of pious women into the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Consolation, devoted to the service of the afflicted.
Lifespan: 1815–1876
Beatified: 8 May 1977 by Pope Paul VI
Canonized: 11 December 1988 by Pope John Paul II, Vatican Basilica
Memoria liturgica: 11 June
Teacher of humanity and authentic instrument of mercy and consolation
María Rosa Molas was born in Reus, Spain, from a family of craftsmen, on 24 March 1815, and baptized the following day with the names Rosa Francesca Maria Dolores.
Her father, José Molas, had ancestors from Andalusia; her mother, María Vallvé, had deep Catalan roots. This gives María Rosa a rich personality, endowed with diverse qualities that contrast and harmonize within her. She is intuitive and sensitive; in her there is tenderness and delicacy of feeling, compassion for the sufferings of others and resourcefulness in alleviating them; but she also carries in her temperament the seny de la terra — the practical wisdom of the land — of the Catalan people. She therefore has “a lively and energetic character, enterprising and resolute,” “a strong and tenacious spirit,” and a keen practical sense.
Contemplation becomes in her concrete service. Humility itself is translated “into tireless energy.” She always has “a confident bearing” and “a nimble gesture in work.” “To do good for others she finds no obstacles”; “no difficulty stands in the way of her desire to do good.”
Her confessor — and her first biographer — notes that she was born on the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and sees in this circumstance a sign of the gifts with which God wished to enrich her: “the Lord doubtless wished that the greatest Love of loves and the most cruel desolation of Jesus should be reflected in her.” According to him, this circumstance was the announcement of her participation in the sufferings of Christ, so that she might be “a teacher of His love” and “a messenger of great charity.” It was also “the prelude to the intense and frequent desolations by which she would be tested.”
Indeed, from the day of her First Communion, María Rosa lives a profound mystical experience, in which the Lord sometimes allows her to taste the ineffable sweetness of His presence. “Whoever has experienced how sweet the Lord is,” she exclaims, “can no longer cease walking in His presence.” God is for her “sweet Spouse” or simply “my Sweetness.”
But in her spiritual experience, “the silence of God” more often predominates, and the painful sense of the absence of the Spouse for whom she longs and sacrifices herself. This experience marks her existence and leads her along a path of humility and self-denial, of forgetfulness of self and tireless pursuit of God’s glory and the good of her brothers and sisters. This is the fundamental attitude of her life, which she herself expresses when she repeats: “All for the glory of God. All for the good of our brothers and sisters. Nothing for ourselves.” This is the path of humility, simplicity, and charity, of self-denial and a spirit of sacrifice which — she repeats — “are the soul of the Institute.” “It is the humility of charity” that drives her to live always attentive to others and to perform the most heroic gestures with great simplicity and naturalness.
In January 1841 she had entered a Corporation of Sisters of Charity who rendered their services in the Hospital and the House of Charity in Reus, and whom she believed to be religious sisters. There, in humble service to the poorest, she gives proofs of often heroic charity; there, she listens to the clamor of the people of her town and defends their lot. On 11 June 1844, the city of Reus was besieged and bombarded by the troops of General Zurbano. María Rosa, with two other sisters, crosses the line of fire and goes to kneel at the feet of the General, imploring and obtaining peace for her people.
Some years later, with four other sisters, she is sent to Tortosa, where her field of action expands. Here she discovers the irregular situation, with regard to the Church, of the group to which she belongs and feels “the spiritual orphanhood in which she finds herself.” Her boundless love for the Church drives her to dialogue with her sisters, to discern with them the ways of the Lord, and to place herself, on 14 March 1857, under the obedience of the ecclesiastical authority of Tortosa. She thus finds herself the foundress of a religious congregation which the following year — on 14 November — at María Rosa’s own request, was named the Sisters of Consolation, “because the works they carry out every day … are all directed toward consoling their neighbor…”
By her will, the Congregation set out above all “to extend the knowledge and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ,” “as the source and model of all charity, all comfort and perfection,” and “to continue on earth the mission of our most sweet Redeemer, Jesus, by consoling the afflicted,” educating, serving the human person “in whatever situation of need.”
The Lord had prepared her for the mission of foundress through multiple services and through various situations, at times painful, which she lived with serene and heroic patience. Such was the grave slander she endured when, in obedience to her superiors, she had to prepare herself in secret to obtain the Teacher’s Diploma; such was the persecution that the civil authorities undertook against her more than once.
María Rosa lives through these situations with fortitude; she lives them in silence, and has for those “who afflict her spirit, kindness and delicate attentions.” She lives them with serenity and, to evident injustices, responds with generous and even heroic service.
Thus to the authorities of Tortosa who have unjustly removed her from the Public School for children, she lends her own collaboration to organize a lazaretto, “ready to sacrifice everything for the benefit of our poor brothers and sisters” should “our services be capable of bringing relief to the situation of our neighbor.”
Such gentleness and patience in endurance are not, in María Rosa, timidity or weakness, but courage that becomes boldness, daring, and evangelical freedom when the interests of the poor, truth, or the defense of the weak are at stake. Thus we see her energetically oppose a mayor who demands from her an oath to a Spanish constitution contrary to the interests of the Church; courageously take up the defense of the wet-nurses of her foundlings, whose merited wages the public administration had long failed to pay; defend her sisters, unjustly denigrated by the administrator of one of her hospitals; energetically prevent a doctor from experimenting with certain surgical interventions on her foundlings.
María Rosa does all this without ever losing her serene equilibrium. “She possessed the secret of winning hearts.” “She inspired recollection and veneration.” “It was inexplicable to see her always full of goodness, affable, affectionate, with an enviable serenity of spirit.”
This constant attitude that characterizes María Rosa Molas can be understood only by discovering “the secret of her heart, filled with God alone”; everything was “the effect of her intimate and continual union with God, which presided over her life, her affections, her every action.”
“Any sacrifice whatsoever was of little importance to her, as were humiliations, slanders, persecutions. Whatever drew her closer to God was welcome to her; difficult, unbearable, bitter was whatever she feared might offend Him.”
Driven by this love of God, “she becomes lived charity”; “she bends over all who are in need, without distinction”; the most destitute elderly and the most abandoned children “are the apple of her eye.”
She spends her life doing good to all, offering herself “in the precious gift of her availability, in mercy and consolation, for those who sought her out or who, even without knowing it, were in need of her.”
She fulfills her consoling mission thus, until toward the end of May 1876 she senses that the Lord is drawing near. After a brief illness, wounded more by the desire for God than by infirmity, worn out more by tireless service to the poor than by the years, she asks her confessor permission to die: “Let me depart”; and after receiving his consent: “May the most holy will of God be fulfilled.”
She died, toward the end of the day, on 11 June 1876, the Sunday of the Most Holy Trinity.
She left her consoling mission in the Church to her religious family, the Sisters of Our Lady of Consolation, which today is spread across eleven nations and four continents.