Saint María Josefa Sancho de Guerra

She was born in Vitoria on September 7, 1842, the eldest daughter of Bernabé Sancho, a chair-maker, and Petra de Guerra, and baptized the next day. ² Her father died when she was seven, according to the Holy See's biography; Orellana says six. ²⁶ Her mother prepared her for her First Communion, which she made at ten. ² At fifteen she was sent to relatives in Madrid to complete her education. ²⁶

The Holy See's biography picks out three things in her childhood: a strong devotion to the Eucharist and to Mary, a sensitivity toward the poor and the sick, and an inclination to solitude. ² Back in Vitoria at eighteen, she told her mother she wanted to enter an enclosed monastery. ² Later in life she used to say, in the Holy See's English, "I was born with a religious vocation." ²

Finding the form of it took years. In 1860 she was about to enter the contemplative Conceptionist nuns at Aranjuez when typhus prevented her, and her mother helped her through the disappointment. ²⁶ In the months that followed she came to think God was calling her to an active life, and she entered the Servants of Mary, recently founded in Madrid by Saint Soledad Torres Acosta. ²

As her profession drew near she was assailed by doubts about whether she belonged there. ² Orellana says she was twenty-two. ⁶ She opened her soul to several confessors, and they judged that she had mistaken her vocation. ² Her conversations with Soledad Torres Acosta herself and with Archbishop Anthony Mary Claret brought her, slowly, to the decision to leave and found a new family whose only purpose would be to nurse the sick in hospitals and in their homes. ²⁶ Orellana adds that Claret had her spend three days offering the Eucharist to the Holy Spirit before she decided. ⁶

Other sisters of the Servants of Mary shared the same aim and left with her, with the permission of the cardinal archbishop of Toledo. ²³ The Holy See's English biography says there were three of them; its Spanish text says four, and so does Orellana. ²³⁶

The foundation was made at Bilbao in the spring of 1871, when she was twenty-nine. ² Orellana says the journey had first been meant for Barcelona, and that it was a hard trial for her in spirit; even some who later helped her most, among them the priest Mariano José de Ibargoingotia, began by distrusting her. ⁶ The institute received diocesan approval in 1874 and papal approval in 1886, according to Orellana, and grew inside Spain and beyond it. ⁶

She was its superior from the founding until her death: forty-one years in the Holy See's biography, forty-two in Orellana's. ²⁶ She made hard journeys to visit its communities, and Orellana notes that those decades included the Carlist wars and the sieges of Bilbao. ²⁶ John Paul II, canonizing her, called her "an authentic apostle in the field of health," whose way of caring sought to combine motherly and spiritual attention. ⁴

Her own words, quoted in the Holy See's English, explain the kind of care she meant: "Don't believe sisters that the assistance consists only in giving medicines and food to the sick. There is another type of assistance that must never be forgotten and it is the assistance of the heart that adjusts and enter in sympathy with the person who suffers and go to meet his necessities." ² John Paul II quoted the same lines at the canonization. ⁴ In the directory of nursing she wrote for the institute, the Holy See's biography says, she went so far as to claim that a sister who accompanies a sick person to the door of eternity does more good than a missionary preaching to the lost. ²

A long illness finally confined her to the house at Bilbao. ² John Paul II said she was ill for the last twelve years of her life. ⁴ Orellana describes a serious heart condition, later complicated by a lung lesion, which in 1911 left her able only to lie in bed or sit in an armchair. ⁶ From there she followed the communities in Spain and abroad through a long and careful correspondence. ²⁶

Orellana records two things she said near the end. When her sisters tried to give her special treatment, she asked, "Let me die like a poor religious... Treat me like the poor; I want to die as I have lived" (translated from the Spanish). ⁶ She died at Bilbao on March 20, 1912, saying, Orellana writes, "It is all done" (translated). ²⁶ The Holy See's biography counts forty-three houses and more than a thousand sisters at her death; Orellana counts forty-two houses. ²⁶

Her death moved Bilbao, and her funeral had what the Holy See calls an extraordinary resonance. ² She was buried in the city cemetery, and in 1926, as her reputation for holiness grew, her remains were moved to the chapel of the motherhouse, where they rest. ² The cause was delayed by the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and the diocesan process opened at Bilbao only on May 31, 1951. ² John Paul II beatified her on September 27, 1992, and canonized her on October 1, 2000, together with Katharine Drexel, Josephine Bakhita, and Augustine Zhao Rong and his companions. ²⁴⁵

None of the sources used for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ¹²⁴ At the canonization John Paul II prayed that she would help the Basque people "to banish violence for ever," so that Euskadi might be a place "where the rights of every person are respected and innocent blood is no longer shed." ⁴ At her beatification he called the Church's preferential love for those who suffer in body or spirit the charism she left to her sisters, and to anyone who wishes to spend a life drying the tears of those most in need. ⁵

Her feast is March 20, the day she died, which is where the Roman Martyrology enters her: at Bilbao, the foundress of the Servants of Jesus, "whom she formed above all for the care of the sick and the poor" (translated from the Italian). ¹ She is not on the calendar of the dioceses of the United States. ¹

Her vocation did not arrive whole. She was sure she had one and wrong twice about where it led, first to an enclosed convent that illness kept her from, then to a congregation she left on the eve of profession, with the advice of confessors and the blessing of that congregation's own foundress. ²⁶ The sources tell it without embarrassment, as the way she was led.

The care she taught was practical and it was not only practical. Medicine and food, she told her sisters, are one kind of help, and there is another, of the heart, that adapts itself to the person who suffers. ²⁴ John Paul II added that she gave that care "in a contemplative atmosphere." ⁴

She ended her life on the receiving end of it, nursed in bed by her own sisters for years, and asked them to treat her as they would the poor. ⁴⁶ The woman who founded a congregation to sit with the sick spent her last years as one of them.