María Josefa was born in 1842, the eldest daughter of a large Spanish Catholic family. Her father died at a young age, leaving her mother responsible for the family well-being. María was sent to Madrid to live with wealthy relatives while receiving an education.

María’s mother was religious and had trained her young daughter in the Catholic faith, but was surprised to find María return from Madrid at the age of eighteen insisting on joining a convent. María felt on fire for a religious vocation and kept begging her mother for permission to enter. María joined the Institute of the Servants of Mary, but soon felt uncertain about whether she had chosen the right path. After speaking with various confessors and praying with her uncertainty, she left the Institute.

María had felt the call to establish her own order.

In 1871, at the age of twenty-nine, María Josefa founded the Servants of Jesus of Charity, that focused on caring for Christ in the least of his people—the children, sick, elderly, and the poor. When she became the order’s first superior she took the name María Josefa of the Heart of Jesus. Her order has spread all over the European and Spanish-speaking world—today, the Servants of Jesus of Charity have houses in Chile, Colombia, France and the Dominican Republic.

María Josefa was devoted to the Sacred Heart, and saw her and her sisters’ work with the sick and suffering as participating in Christ’s redemptive sufferings. And this kindness they offered to others was a foretaste of heaven. She wrote to her sisters:

“The charity and mutual love constitute even in this life the paradise of the community. Without cross we cannot live wherever we go, because the religious life is a life of sacrifice and of abnegation. The foundation of greatest perfection is the fraternal charity.”

On March 20, 1912, María Josefa passed away, just short of seventy years old. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II in the Jubilee Year of 2000, on October 1.

St. María Josefa Sancho de Guerra, founder of the Servants of Jesus of Charity—pray for us!