Likewise at Madrid in Spain, Blessed María Sagrario of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga (Elvira Moragas Cantarero), virgin of the Order of Discalced Carmelites and martyr in the same persecution.
Lifespan: 1881–1936
Beatified: 10 May 1998 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 15 August
Before she was shot, she wrote on a piece of paper: “Long live Christ the King!”
María Sagrario of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, born Elvira Moragas Cantarero, was born in Lillo (Toledo) on 8 January 1881; her father was a pharmacist. When she was five years old the family moved to Madrid, where her father continued his work as a pharmacist until 1909, the year of his death. Her elder sister Sagrario had died at just eleven years of age in 1890, to the family’s great distress.
Elvira received a humanistic education from her father, which she went on to continue and refine at the school of the Mercedarian Sisters of San Fernando in Madrid. She pursued her secondary studies with outstanding results at the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros and then enrolled in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Madrid. The only woman among eighty to eighty-five students, she attended university from 1900 to 1905, graduating with the highest marks.
Having obtained her degree, she began to help her father in the pharmacy, and upon his death in 1909 she took over its management personally, becoming almost certainly the second Spanish woman to hold a pharmaceutical licence. Elvira ran the pharmacy with refinement and warmth, and established that Saturdays would be the day set aside for giving alms to the poor — right there in the pharmacy. This custom endured for a long time even after the war; it had become a fixture well known to the poor and needy, who came in great numbers. Once her brother Ricardo had finished his own studies in pharmacy, Elvira — on the advice of her spiritual director, the Jesuit Father José María Rubio Peralta, who was later beatified — decided to enter the monastery of the Discalced Carmelite nuns of Santa Ana y San José in June 1915.
In December of that same year she received the Carmelite habit, taking the name María Sagrario of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, and on Christmas night 1916 she made her first profession. On the Epiphany of 1920 she made her solemn, or final, profession.
In the convent she continued her charitable work as a pharmacist, with the assistance of her brother Ricardo, who had become the licence-holder of the family pharmacy. She lived her life as a Discalced Carmelite with great dedication and particular joy — so much so that the community elected her prioress for the triennium 1927–30.
Always in good spirits, she lived radiating cheerfulness in the service of God and others; she served, among other duties, as portress of the monastery. On 1 July 1936 she was elected prioress once again, just a few days before the outbreak of the notorious Spanish Civil War, which bloodied the nation from 1936 to 1939 and claimed, among religious alone, some 7,300 victims. On 20 July a crowd attacked the convent and the sisters were driven into the street; Mother Sagrario refused to flee Madrid with her brother, wishing instead to remain so that she might assist her nuns, scattered across the city, as best she could.
She spent three weeks sheltering in the home of relatives of another sister. On 14 August she was arrested and taken to the republican prison on the Calle Marqués del Riscal, notorious for the cruelties committed there.
She was questioned several times; Mother Sagrario gave no answers, and wrote only on a piece of paper “Long live Christ the King” — the rallying cry of the martyrs of that bloodstained era. During the night she was transported to the Pradera de San Isidro, and in the early hours of the morning she was shot. It was 15 August 1936, the feast of the Assumption of Mary. She was forty-five years old. What she said in those final moments — so long awaited, in any case — is not known; but two photographs taken after her death show the serenity of her face: no grimace of pain, her eyes open and filled with a holy resignation.
Her death, regarded as a martyrdom, led the Archbishop of Madrid to open the processes for her beatification in 1962. These concluded with the solemn proclamation by Pope John Paul II in St Peter’s Square in Rome on 10 May 1998.
In the tapestry created for the ceremony she is depicted holding the palm of martyrdom; near her feet are vials and pharmaceutical instruments; in the background are the Carmelite convent and the hermitage of Saint Isidore where she was shot. In her, pharmacists in Spain and throughout the world have found a heavenly patroness who knew how to serve with competence and goodness in the laboratory and dispensary, yet with dignity and heroism even in the face of death.
The Church commemorates her on 15 August, while the Discalced Carmelites observe her memory on 16 August.