Saint María Soledad Torres Acosta

She was born in Madrid on December 2, 1826. ⁶ EWTN describes her parents as modest shopkeepers who taught her the faith well. ⁷ The sources do not agree on the name she was given: The Leaven, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, calls her Bibiana; the National Catholic Register and Catholic News Service call her Manuela. ⁶⁸⁹

The Leaven, drawing on her sisters' history, says she was small, sickly and plain to look at, quoting it: "No one could have guessed that such a saint was hidden in such an ordinary appearance." ⁶ As a child, it says, she loved to visit the sick of her neighborhood. ⁶ EWTN says she was taught by the Vincentian sisters, wanted to join them, and was refused because her health was poor. ⁷

The idea of nursing the sick at home came, in the Register's account, from Father Miguel Martínez y Sanz, a parish priest in Madrid who saw the need for bedside care. ⁸ EWTN says he was grieved to see the sick of his poor district die abandoned and without the sacraments, and thought of gathering devout women to visit them at home and help them die well. ⁷ CNS calls him a Servite priest. ⁹

She offered herself, and EWTN says he turned her away at first because she seemed too frail. ⁷ On August 15, 1851, she was among the seven women who professed vows as the first Servants of Mary; The Leaven gives her age as twenty-four. ⁶⁷ The novelty, EWTN says, was that they went to the sick in their homes, at no cost, to whoever asked. ⁷

She took the name María Soledad, which CNS says was in honor of Our Lady of Sorrows. ⁹ The sources differ on how she came to the work. EWTN says she had sat with the dying since childhood and had a particular gift for it, while CNS says she became a founder "overcoming her fear of nursing". ⁷⁹

The Leaven says she was made superior general at thirty and held the post until her death; CNS says she was superior for thirty-five years; the Register calls her the institute's first superior. ⁶⁸⁹ EWTN records a hard interval: when the founding priest left as a missionary, his successor believed rumors against her and removed her as superior, and she was restored when the truth came out. ⁷ CNS adds that she fought government opposition, and quotes one of her novices: "Mother Soledad is like an anvil; she is constantly taking a beating." ⁹

When cholera reached Spain, EWTN says, the hospitals overflowed and many of the sick were abandoned by their families for fear of contagion, and she and her sisters went everywhere to nurse those left alone. ⁷ In the Spanish greeting that follows his canonization homily, Paul VI recalled her "intrepid charity" in Valencia. ¹

The Leaven quotes two of her sayings to her sisters: "A Servant of Mary must be prepared to go to the miserable huts of the poor as well as to the mansions of the rich," and "My daughters, when you care for a sick person, you are caring for Christ himself." ⁶ She placed the congregation under the protection of Mary, Health of the Sick. ⁶

In her lifetime the Servants of Mary opened convents in Spain and Cuba, according to The Leaven; the Register credits her with 41 convents in Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico. ⁶⁸ She died at the motherhouse in Madrid on October 11, 1887. ⁶⁷ John Paul II's address of 2001 marked the 150th year of the institute and the 125th of its papal approval, which puts that approval in 1876. ⁴

Paul VI canonized her in Saint Peter's on January 25, 1970. ¹² He began by calling it a moment of great consolation "in this hour of tribulation for the Church", in words translated here from the Italian, and declined to retell her life, which he said was simple and silent and could be summed up in two words: humility and charity. ¹

What he singled out was the form her charity took. Care of the sick was not new, he said, but caring for them in their own homes was a form that, as it seemed to him, nobody before her had devised systematically, and that nobody had thought it possible to entrust to sisters of a canonically organized institute. ¹ He took the text from the Gospel, "I was sick, and you visited me", and drew the distinction: here it is not the sick person who goes looking for care, but the Servant who goes to him, in his own home, where illness has not taken from him his individuality and his freedom. ¹

At the Angelus that day he spoke of her as a humble and poor religious, and said her canonization showed that faith, far from alienating people from the world, makes them able to understand human suffering and to care for it. ²

John Paul II received her sisters in 2001, for the 175th anniversary of her birth, and said she had recognized, in what looked like a simple welfare need of her time, a call to bear witness to the words "I was sick and you visited me". ⁴ He said their care of the sick at home, without payment, proclaims that illness does not strip a person of dignity. ⁴ In his English letter of November 13, 2002, he called "care of the sick in their own homes" the charism that distinguishes them, and said he had blessed her statue that day in a niche on the outside of Saint Peter's Basilica. ³ The Holy See Press Office recorded that he sprinkled it with holy water after the general audience. ⁵

The Servants of Mary began serving in the United States in 1914 and opened their Kansas City convent in 1917. ⁶ The cathedral of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, Saint Peter the Apostle, is now the Shrine of Saint María Soledad, dedicated by Archbishop Joseph Naumann in 2023. ⁶⁸ The Register reports about 1,200 sisters, in 22 countries, who still nurse the sick and dying through the night in their homes, without charge. ⁸

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for her, so none is given here. ¹⁶⁷⁸ The Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas has dedicated a shrine to her in its cathedral, which its archbishop designated a place of pilgrimage and healing for the sick and their loved ones; the Register reports this without naming her the patron of any group. ⁸

Her feast is October 11, the day she died in 1887. ⁶⁷ The Servants of Mary keep it as a solemnity, and in Kansas City in Kansas the day is marked at the cathedral shrine with Masses in English and Spanish and the blessing of a relic. ⁶

Paul VI found nothing spectacular to tell in her life and said so: no adventures, no prodigies, few writings. ¹ What he praised was a method, going to the sick instead of waiting for them to come. ¹

Her sisters spend their nights in other people's houses, at the bedsides of the dying, for nothing. ⁸ She told them that the sick person in front of them was Christ, and that they should be as ready for a hut as for a mansion. ⁶

She was removed from the work she had given her life to, on the strength of gossip, and EWTN says she bore it patiently. ⁷ A novice who watched her called her an anvil. ⁹