MARIA ANTONIA di SAN GIUSEPPE. — M. A. de la Paz y Figueroa, b. at Santiago del Estero (Argentina) in 1730, d. at Buenos Aires on 6 March 1799.
Having consecrated herself to the service of God at the age of fifteen, and gathered around her, as in a kind of congregation without fixed rules, a group of young women, she began to zealously promote the practice of popular missions and spiritual exercises. When the Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish dominions in 1767, M. A., with the favor of civil and religious authorities, sought to continue their work, preaching to the people and the clergy and traveling from 1775 to 1799 through the vast regions of Tucumán, San Miguel, Ríoja, and Córdoba; she also went to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and the Río de la Plata, always with great fruit in conversions. In Buenos Aires she also founded a house of spiritual exercises, where more than 70,000 people passed through from 1780 to 1788.
The cause of beatification was introduced in 1917.