Vedruna, Joaquína de, Blessed

VEDRUNA, Joaquína de, Blessed. - Foundress of the Carmelites of Charity, b. in Barcelona on 16 April 1783, d. at Vich on 28 Aug. 1854.

Married at the age of 16 to Teodoro de Mas, by whom she had 9 children, she was an admirable example of a Christian spouse and mother. Left a widow at the age of 33 (1816) and having withdrawn to the family estate at Vich to oversee the administration of the large patrimony, she returned to her former ideal of religious life, and meanwhile, while also attending to the careful education of her children, she devoted herself to a life of extraordinary solitude and austerity. When, then, in 1826, she felt herself fully free, through the departure of her children, who had been directed either to marriage or to the cloister, she gathered around herself 9 companions and founded with them, under the guidance of the Capuchin Stefano di Olot, the Institute of the Carmelites of Charity, with the purpose of providing for the education of girls, especially poor ones, and for the care of the sick. The Seven Years' War, the persecutions, the solitudes of exile and the squalor of prison greatly harmed her work, which nevertheless recovered in 1843, increased rapidly in the number of houses and vocations, and above all increased the spiritual good wrought among the ranks of girls, educated in an integrally living and Christian spirit, and of the sick, tended with every care. The V. was beatified on 19 May 1940. Feast on 22 May.

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