VEDRUNIA, Joaquina de, Blessed. — Foundress of the Carmelite Sisters of Charity. Born in Barcelona on 16 April 1783, died in Vich on 28 August 1854.
Married at the age of sixteen to Teodoro de Mas, by whom she had nine children, she was an admirable example of a Christian wife and mother. Widowed at thirty-three (1816), she retired to the family estate in Vich to oversee the administration of its extensive holdings, while returning to her former religious ideal. Meanwhile, she continued to devote herself to the careful education of her children and embraced a life of extraordinary solitude and austerity. When, in 1826, she felt fully free—her children having either married or entered religious life—she gathered nine companions around her and, under the guidance of the Capuchin Stefano di Olot, founded the Institute of the Carmelite Sisters of Charity. Its purpose was to provide education for young girls, especially the poor, and to care for the sick. The Seven Years' War, persecutions, exile, and imprisonment caused great hardship to her work, yet it revived in 1843, rapidly expanding in the number of houses and vocations, and above all increasing the spiritual good accomplished among the ranks of young girls, educated in a fully alive and Christian spirit, and the sick, tended with every care. She was beatified on 19 May 1940. Feast day: 22 May.