Saint Rafaela María Porras

She was born on March 1, 1850, in the village of Pedro Abad, near Córdoba, and christened Rafaela María del Rosario Francisca Rudencinda Porras y Ayllón. ²⁵ Catholic.net describes "a family of eleven brothers and two sisters" (translated from the Spanish). ⁵ Pius XII, who beatified her, spoke of a mother who taught her the faith by example, and of priests who never failed, at the turning points of her life, to show her the road. ⁴

Her parents died early, and she and her sister Dolores gave themselves to prayer and works of charity. ²⁵ Catholic.net says the two spent a time with the Poor Clares of Córdoba, and that she had made a vow of perpetual chastity at fifteen. ⁵ Paul VI noted how ill this way of life fitted their high social position, and how it set them against the wishes of their family, so much that the pressure at home pushed them toward religious life. ² Pius XII described the criticism they met for living that way, and the scandal when the family discovered that the first step had been taken and the house was empty. ⁴

In 1874, Pius XII said, she met the priest José Antonio Ortiz Urruela, "a man of high aims and energetic decisions" (translated from the Spanish). ⁴ With the help of Monsignor Ceferino González, Catholic.net says, the sisters founded an institute of adorers of the Blessed Sacrament, and soon moved with sixteen other sisters to Madrid. ⁵ Pius XII passed over what he called that most turbulent two years and pointed to the young woman at its center, barely twenty-seven, with a clear ideal of holiness through reparation and a wandering, isolated novitiate on her hands. ⁴ He quoted her: "I do not want to be a foundress" (translated from the Spanish). ⁴

In 1877 Cardinal Moreno gave the institute its first approval. ⁴⁵ On January 24, 1886, it received the decree of praise, and a year later it was approved definitively as the congregation of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart. ² Catholic.net counts the same ten years from diocesan to papal approval, which it attributes to Leo XIII. ⁵ Pius XII said she drew her spirituality from the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. ⁴

Paul VI set out what she wanted the congregation to be: the public worship of the Blessed Sacrament exposed, in reparation for offenses against the love of Christ; the formation of young women, with a preference for educating the poor; and houses where people who wished could make retreats and meet God. ² Adoration was the center of it. For her, he said, in words he quoted, "an apostolic work cut off from the sacred duty of Eucharistic adoration was inconceivable" (translated from the Spanish). ² To keep that point of her rule, he added, she did not hesitate to take urgent, painful and risky decisions. ²

She governed the institute for sixteen years, Paul VI said, with great dedication and tact. ² Then she had to give up the direction of her own work. ² Catholic.net says serious difficulties in government moved her to resign in favor of her sister Dolores, and Pius XII dates the resignation to 1893, in Rome. ⁴⁵ Paul VI called the reasons groundless; the Martyrology records that she was considered mentally unsound. ¹²

Pius XII did not soften what followed. Doubts and mistrust isolated her little by little, he said, and at forty-three, with a rich nature, she had thirty-two years of life left, which he called "more than six interminable lustrums of progressive annihilation and martyrdom in the shadows" (translated from the Spanish). ⁴ Catholic.net gives the time as thirty years of isolation, hard work and humiliations borne in patience. ⁵ She went into it, Pius XII said, not to forget, which would have been too sweet, but to be forgotten. ⁴ He recalled that in her retreats she had often asked for the humility the Exercises describe, to wish "to be thought vain and foolish for Christ" rather than wise, and that the Lord had taken her at her word (translated from the Spanish). ⁴

Catholic.net records that someone called her "humility made flesh" (translated). ⁵ Paul VI, on the day of her canonization, called her a saint "very humble, meek, distinguished, silent" (translated from the Italian). ³

On December 24, 1924, Pius XI opened the Holy Door for the jubilee of 1925. Thirteen days later, Pius XII said, the gates of heaven opened for her. ⁴ She died in Rome on January 6, 1925, and Paul VI said she died practically forgotten, still in the humiliation she had accepted. ¹² She was buried in Rome. ³

Pius XII beatified her in May 1952; Catholic.net dates it May 18, and his address to the pilgrims was given the next day. ⁴⁵ By then, he said, her sisters ran schools, retreat houses and residences from Spain to Japan, and the root of it all was the sacrifice and holiness of one soul. ⁴ Paul VI canonized her in Saint Peter's on January 23, 1977. ²³ At the Angelus afterward he spoke of the Handmaids of the Via Piave, well known in Rome, and said they deserved to be known above all for adoring the Eucharist and for their work in educating women and in social assistance. ³

None of the sources used for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ¹²⁴ At her canonization Paul VI asked her intercession for Spain, for firmness in the faith, fidelity to the Church, the holiness of its clergy and sincere brotherhood among all classes of the nation. ²

Her feast is January 6, the day she died, where the Roman Martyrology enters her: at Rome, the virgin who founded the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and, "held to be insane, brought her life to a holy end amid sufferings and penance" (translated from the Italian). ¹ January 6 is also the solemnity of the Epiphany, which heads the Martyrology for the day. ¹ She is not on the calendar of the dioceses of the United States. ¹

Most founders are remembered for what they built. She is remembered as much for the thirty years after it was taken from her, which she spent inside the congregation she had founded, working, praying, and being passed over. ²⁴⁵ The sources call the reasons for her removal groundless and record that she was thought to be insane, and they do not make that easier to read. ¹²

Pius XII said that she went into the shadow with her eyes open, without a complaint, and that what made her conspicuous there was only a more austere life and a deeper humility. ⁴ He also said what she kept doing: offering herself each day to the Heart of Christ, to which she attributed her foundation and her life. ⁴

Paul VI, on the day he canonized her, imagined her inviting people to try the first of her paths, prayer absorbed in silent adoration before Christ hidden in the Eucharist, and then to go and serve the brothers and sisters in need. ³ It is the same order she gave her congregation, adoration first and the work after, and she held to it when the work was no longer hers. ²