Joaquina Vedruna

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Saint Joaquina Vedruna (or Joaquima, in Catalan) (Barcelona, Spain, April 16, 1783 – August 28, 1854) was a Spanish nun, founder of the Carmelite Sisters of the Charity. He was born from a bourgeois family. In 1799, she married the lawyer and Vic's landowner Teodoro de Mas, with whom she had nine children. Her husband died in 1816 and he moved with her children to their estate in Vic. She began her charitable activities with the sick and young women. Her spiritual director, the Capuchin Esteban de Olot, suggested her to found an apostolic congregation devoted to education and charity. The bishop of Vic, Pablo Jesús Corcuera, told to her that the institute shall to be of Carmelite inspiration. The same bishop wrote the rule on February 6, 1826 and on February 26 she and other eight women pronounced the vows. In few years the Vedruna's Carmelites founded several houses in Catalonia. She had to fleeing from Spain during the First Carlist War, as she founded an hospital in the Carlist town Berga, that was further occupied by the Liberals. She was in the Rousillon, France, from 1836 to 1842. The congregation was definitively approved in 1850. In spite of serious challenges posed by civil war and secular opposition, the institute she founded soon spread into Catalonia. Thereafter communities were established throughout Spain and Hispanic America. Sickness ultimately compelled her to resign as superior of her order; although she actually died during a cholera epidemic in Barcelona, over the final four years of her life, she slowly succumbed to paralysis. At her death in 1854 at the age of 71, Joaquina was known and admired for her high degree of prayer, deep trust in God and selfless charity. She was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1940 and was canonized in 1959. She is buried in the Carmelites of the Charity's mother-house in Vic.

[edit] External links

• American Catholic article on Blessed Joachima
• Saint Patrick's Cathedral article on Joaquina Vedruna de Mas, Widow Foundress
• (Spanish) Biography by Luis Sanz Burata

[edit] Bibliography

• Itúrbide, Emilio: Del matrimonio a la gloria de Bernini: Santa Joaquina Vedruna, fundadora del Instituto de Hermanas Carmelitas de la Caridad. Ejemplo vivo para todos los estados de la vida, Pamplona: Gómez, 1959