Saint Maria Rosa Molas

She was born in Reus on March 24, 1815, in the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and baptized the next day Rosa Francisca María de los Dolores. ²⁷ At home she was Dolores. ⁶ Her father, José Molas, had family from Andalusia, and her mother, María Vallvé, deep Catalan roots; the Dicastery describes a household of artisans. ² The sisters of her congregation remember her father as her first spiritual guide, and her mother as the one from whom she learned a love that gives itself away. ⁷

Her confessor, who was also her first biographer, made much of the night she was born. The Dicastery quotes him seeing in it a sign that she would share in both the love and the desolation of Christ's Passion, and "the prelude of the intense and frequent desolations with which she would be tried" (translated here from the Italian). ² From her First Communion, the same account says, she knew moments of great sweetness in prayer, but more often what she called the silence of God, and the painful sense that the one she loved was absent. ² John Paul II returned to this at her canonization: her mission of consolation, he said, was given to her through an experience of desert, cross and inner desolation. ³

According to Pettiti, she felt the call to religious life clearly at sixteen, and her father, a man who went to Mass every day, opposed it. She waited, he says, ten years. ⁶

In January 1841 she joined a Corporation of Sisters of Charity who served the hospital and the house of charity of Reus, and whom, the Dicastery notes, she believed to be religious. ² Pettiti describes them as a tiny community never recognized by the Church, though everyone took them for nuns; she took the habit there and the name Maria Rosa. ⁶ The summary that heads his entry calls the group the Daughters of Charity. ⁶ She nursed the abandoned sick, and later ran a house for children and a school for girls. ⁶

Reus remembers her for one afternoon. When General Zurbano's troops besieged and shelled the town, she crossed the line of fire with other sisters, knelt at the general's feet and asked for peace for her people, and obtained it. ²⁶ The Dicastery dates this to June 11, 1844, and says two sisters went with her; Pettiti also gives 1844. ²⁶ John Paul II, in the canonization homily, put it in 1843 and said she went in company with a Sister Estivill. ³

She was later sent to Tortosa, in 1849 according to Pettiti, with four other sisters. ²⁶ There she learned that the group she had given her life to had no standing before the Church, and felt, in a phrase the Dicastery quotes, "the spiritual orphanhood in which she found herself" (translated here). ² She talked it through with her sisters and, when the house at Reus would not follow, took the Tortosa community on its own. ²⁶ On March 14, 1857, she placed it under the obedience of the Church authority of Tortosa, and so found herself the foundress of a religious congregation. ²

On November 14, 1858, at her own request, the new congregation took the name of the Sisters of Consolation, because, in the words the Dicastery quotes, the works they did each day "are all directed at consoling their neighbor" (translated here). ² Its aim, as she set it down, was to spread the knowledge and reign of Jesus Christ as the source of all consolation, and to carry on his mission by comforting the afflicted, teaching, and serving people in any kind of need. ² It ran hospitals, schools and houses of charity. ⁶

The sources do not make her gentle in the soft sense. The Dicastery tells of a slander she bore when her superiors had her study in secret for a teacher's diploma, and of public authorities who moved against her more than once. ² When Tortosa unjustly removed her from the public school, she offered the same authorities her help in organizing a lazaretto. ² She stood up to a mayor who demanded that she swear to a Spanish constitution which, the Dicastery says, ran against the interests of the Church. ² She took up the cause of the wet nurses of her foundlings, whom the administration had not paid, defended her sisters against a hospital administrator who maligned them, and stopped a doctor from trying out certain operations on the foundling children. ²

Paul VI, at her beatification, put her in a hard time: a country torn by factions, children and young people without schooling or prospects, old people without care. ⁴ She bent toward anyone in need without distinction, he said, and in that way became "a teacher of humanity" (translated from the Spanish). ⁴ He also named her concern for women, and John Paul II, eleven years later, spoke of her work for the advancement of women in the same breath as his letter Mulieris Dignitatem. ³⁴

Toward the end of May 1876 she felt her end coming. ² After a short illness she asked her confessor for leave to die, the Dicastery says, and, given it, added, "May the most holy will of God be done" (translated here). ² She died toward the close of day on June 11, 1876, Trinity Sunday, at sixty-one. ²⁶ Paul VI, beatifying her nearly a century later, noted that a life which began humbly in Reus ended humbly in Tortosa. ⁴

Paul VI beatified her on May 8, 1977, and John Paul II canonized her in Saint Peter's Basilica on December 11, 1988, the third Sunday of Advent. ²³ The summary on Santi e Beati prints November 11; the homily is dated December 11. ³⁶ At the canonization the pope set her among the saints of nineteenth-century Catalonia, naming Anthony Mary Claret, Francisco Palau, Francisco Coll and Joaquina Vedruna, and, in Tortosa itself, Enrique de Ossó and Manuel Domingo y Sol. ³ The next day he told the pilgrims, who had come from Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador and Belgium, that she had known how to be an instrument of consolation for everyone without distinction. ⁵ By the time of the canonization, Pettiti writes, her daughters numbered some seven hundred in about a hundred houses, and the Dicastery's account has the congregation in eleven countries on four continents. ²⁶

None of the sources used for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ¹²³ John Paul II asked her intercession for her sisters, that they would carry on her mission of mercy and consolation with humility and self-denial, and for all who had received the message of her life, that they would be bearers of God's consolation to others. ⁵

Her feast is June 11, the day she died, which is where the Roman Martyrology enters her: at Tortosa, the virgin who "transformed a sodality of pious women into the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Consolation for the service of those in need" (translated from the Italian). ¹ She is not on the calendar of the dioceses of the United States, so her day is kept where her sisters and the Martyrology keep it. ¹

She repeated a short rule that the Dicastery quotes: "Everything for the glory of God. Everything for the good of our brothers and sisters. Nothing for ourselves" (translated here). ² It is easy to say and was hard to live, and the account of her life is mostly the record of what it cost.

Much of her prayer, by the same account, was dry: the silence of God more often than his sweetness. ² She did not stop serving to wait for consolation, and the congregation she founded was named for the thing she so often went without herself. ²³ John Paul II saw no contradiction there. The consolation she received, he said, was Christ himself, shared in his own desolation on the cross and in Gethsemane. ³

She told her sisters, in words the canonization homily quotes: "Let us not doubt the love of God. Though we are little, we can be instruments of his mercy" (translated from the Italian). ³ The life around that sentence includes a walk across a battlefield and a quarrel with a mayor, and both were part of the same mercy. ²³