At Madrid in Spain, Blessed Mary of the Sorrows Rodríguez Sopeña, virgin, who, giving the highest testimony of Christian charity, drew near to the lowest members of the society of her time, especially in the suburbs of the larger cities, and, to proclaim the Gospel and to advance the poor and workers in social life, founded the Institute of Catechist Ladies and the Work of the Doctrines.
Lifespan: 1848–1918
Beatified: 23 March 2003 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 10 January
To make of all mankind one single family in Christ Jesus
Mary of the Sorrows Rodríguez Sopeña was born at Vélez Rubio (Almería) on 30 December 1848, the fourth of seven children. Her parents, Tomás Rodríguez Sopeña and Nicoleta Ortega Salomón, had moved from Madrid to that town for reasons of employment. Don Tomás had completed his law studies at a very young age and was therefore unable to practise, obtaining a post as administrator of the estates of the Marquesses of Vélez.
Dolores spent her childhood and adolescence in various towns of the Alpujarras, as her father began to exercise the functions of a Magistrate and underwent several transfers in the course of his career. She herself, however, describes this period of her life as a “lake of tranquility.”
In 1866 her father was appointed Magistrate at the Court of Almería: Dolores was seventeen years old. There she began to move in society, but parties and that way of life held no attraction for her; her interest lay in doing good for her neighbor. In Almería she had her first experiences of apostolate: she turned her attention, both materially and spiritually, to two sisters ill with typhus and to a leper, all in secret for fear that her parents might forbid it. She also visited the poor through the Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul, accompanying her mother.
Three years later her father was transferred to the Court of Puerto Rico, where he went with one of his sons, while the rest of the family remained in Madrid. In the capital Dolores set her life on a more ordered footing: she chose a spiritual director and devoted herself to teaching catechism in the women’s prison, at the Hospital of La Princesa, and in the Sunday Schools.
In 1872 the family was reunited in Puerto Rico. Dolores was twenty-three years old and would remain in America until the age of twenty-eight. She began her contact with the Jesuits. Father Goicoechea was her first spiritual director. In Puerto Rico she founded the Association of the Daughters of Mary and schools for people of color, in which literacy education and catechism were provided.
In 1873 her father was appointed Magistrate at the Court of Santiago de Cuba. These were difficult times; a religious schism had broken out on the island. For this reason Dolores’s activity was limited to visiting the sick at the military hospital. She applied for admission to the Sisters of Charity, but was not accepted because of a defect in her eyesight. She had undergone surgery on both eyes at the age of eight, and this condition accompanied her throughout her life.
After the schism was resolved, she began working in the outlying neighborhoods and founded what she called “Instruction Centers,” in which not only catechism but also general education was offered and medical assistance provided. Many collaborators joined her in this work, and she established it in three different neighborhoods.
Her mother died in Cuba; her father asked to be retired and they returned to Madrid in 1876. In Madrid she organized her life on three fronts: the care of the household and of her father, apostolic work — the same as she had done before leaving Spain — and her spiritual life. She chose a director and began making the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises annually. In 1883 her father died, and the desire to enter a religious order revived within her.
On the advice of her spiritual director, Father López Soldado, S.J., she entered the convent of the Visitation, even though she had never before envisioned a wholly contemplative life. After ten days she left the convent, having determined that this was not her vocation. On leaving she devoted herself with greater intensity to the apostolate.
She opened a “Social House” which made room for the various needs she had observed in her visits to the hospital and the prison. During one of her visits to a former prisoner who had been released, she entered the slum of Las Injurias. It was the year 1885. Dolores was thirty-six years old.
Taking note of the moral, material, and spiritual situation of that slum’s inhabitants, she resolved to visit it methodically each week and invited many of her friends to join her. There began what was soon called the “Work of the Doctrines,” and later the “Workers’ Centers.”
At the suggestion of the Bishop of Madrid, Mgr. Ciriaco Sancha, she founded in 1892 an Association of Secular Apostolate (today: “Sopeña Lay Movement”). The following year it received civil approval. The Work extended to eight neighborhoods of the capital.
In 1896 she began her activity outside Madrid. Despite opposition from the Association, she agreed to found the Work in Seville. Following many misunderstandings, she resigned the presidency in Madrid the following year and settled in Seville. In just four years she made 199 journeys across Spain to establish and consolidate the Work of the Doctrines. She also accompanied Father Tarín, S.J., on some missions in Andalusia.
In 1900 she took part in a pilgrimage to Rome for the Holy Year. She spent a day of retreat at the tomb of Saint Peter and, in prayer, received the call to found a Religious Institute that would continue the Work of the Doctrines and lend spiritual support to the lay Association. Cardinal Sancha, at that time Bishop of Toledo, proposed that she found it in that city.
On 24 September 1901, at Loyola, following a course of Spiritual Exercises made with eight companions, she drew up the founding act of the “Institute of the Catechist Ladies” (today: “Dolores Sopeña Catechist Institute”); the official foundation, however, took place on 31 October in Toledo.
One of her great insights was to found, at the same time, a civil association (today: “Sopeña Social and Cultural Work — OSCUS”) which obtained government recognition in 1902.
In 1905 she received the Decree of Praise (Decretum Laudis) from the Holy See; two years later, on 21 November 1907, the approval of the Constitutions directly from His Holiness Pope Pius X.
During these years her “Doctrines” had been transformed into the “Workers’ Centers of Instruction,” because workers deeply imbued with anticlericalism gathered there, and it was not possible openly to arrange religious instruction. This circumstance also meant that the religious women of the Institute wore neither the traditional habit nor any religious insignia. Dolores adapted her methods in order to achieve her aim: to draw near to the workers “far from the Church” who had been unable to receive cultural, moral, or religious instruction, and to unite those “socially distant from one another” — that is, “the working and popular class” with “the upper and prosperous class.” She summed this up in two directives for action: to confer dignity on the worker and to create fraternity.
Undergirding her activity at the service of others was a profound and genuine faith, a rich spirituality. Her commitment to the dignity of the person flowered from her experience of a God who is Father of all, who loves us with infinite tenderness and desires that we live as children and siblings. From this sprang her great desire “to make of all humanity one single family in Christ Jesus.” Her deep union with God enabled her to discover him present in everything and in everyone, especially in those most in need of dignity and affection.
To go out to meet every person in their actual situation, to enter the marginalized slums of her time, was inconceivable for a woman at the end of the nineteenth century. The secret of her audacity was her faith — that boundless trust which she acknowledged as her greatest treasure, and which made her feel herself an instrument in the hands of God, an instrument in the service of fraternity, love, mercy, equality, dignity, justice, and peace.
In a few years she established Communities and Centers in the most industrialized cities of the era. In 1910 the first General Chapter was held and she was re-elected Superior General. In 1914 she founded a house in Rome, and in 1917 the first Catechists set out on a journey to open the first house in America, in Chile.
The following year, on 10 January 1918, Dolores Sopeña died in Madrid in the odor of sanctity.
On 11 July 1992 John Paul II declared her virtues heroic, and on 23 April 2002 the Decree of Approval of the miracle that paved the way for her Beatification was promulgated. Today the Sopeña Family — constituted by the three institutions she founded: the Dolores Sopeña Catechist Institute, the Sopeña Lay Movement, and the Sopeña Social and Cultural Work — is present in Spain, Italy, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.