2023-05-18 07:31:00
May 18, 2023 / 12:31 a.m.
Today the Catholic Church celebrates Santa Rafaela María del Sagrado Corazón, a Spanish nun who was called “humility incarnate” due to her simplicity and grateful attitude towards everyone, regardless of how she was treated.
Perhaps an expression of this was the way that Santa Rafaela María used to encourage her spiritual daughters when she said: “We must be within God and receive everything from Him”. Whoever lives trying to achieve such an ideal will have to serve the Lord with indestructible inner peace and joy, proof of pain and bitterness.
Rafaela María was the founder of a religious Institute of pontifical right, the Congregation of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose members are known as “Handmaids of the Sacred Heart”.
Pope Saint Paul VI, who canonized Santa Rafaela María, highlighted a distinctive feature in her, capable of making her a model for all religious: “The life and work of the saint, if we look at them from the inside, are an excellent apology for the religious life, based on the practice of the evangelical counsels, modeled on the traditional ascetic-mystical scheme, of which Spain has been a teacher with such distinguished figures as Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Dominic, Saint Juan de Ávila and others” (Pope Saint Paul VI at the Mass for the canonization of Rafaela Porras y Ayllón).
Welcome by the Church
Rafaela Porras y Ayllón -first name of the saint- was born on March 1, 1850 in the Spanish town of Pedro Abad, in Córdoba (Spain). Her parents took her to be baptized the next day. Her father, Mr. Ildefonso Porras, was mayor of Pedro Abad and her mother, Mrs. María Ayllón Castillo, came from a wealthy family.
At the age of three Rafaela María lost her father, and when she turned fourteen, she also lost her mother. Together with her sister, she began the path of vocational discernment with the Poor Clares of Córdoba and the following year she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of María Reparadora. It was in this congregation that she took the name Rafaela María del Sagrado Corazón.
Sister Rafaela dedicated herself to prayer and caring for the sick and needy. Her relatives considered that her vocation was too early, however she persevered and was able to overcome that initial resistance.
grateful love
Years later, already consolidated in religious life, she founded, together with her sister Dolores, the Institute of Adorers of the Blessed Sacrament and Daughters of Mary Immaculate, which would be the base of the future Congregation of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart. The sisters had the support of the local bishop from the beginning.
The Institute was made up of sixteen religious, with whom Santa Rafaela María moved to Madrid. There she was granted diocesan approval in 1877. Ten years later, Pope Leo XIII would approve the new congregation, under the name of “Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Mother Rafaela María would be elected superior general and she would make her perpetual profession on November 4, 1888.
Exile
For 30 years Mother Rafaela lived a kind of exile within her own religious community, becoming an anonymous member of the institution she had founded. For three decades, Santa María Rafaela assumed the hardest jobs and the simplest occupations; she went through constant humiliation and, in the end, she suffered the aridity of isolation. She lived like that until God called her into his presence.
Even when the circumstances were adverse, the saint conducted herself with humility and obedience, without demanding any special treatment, despite being the founder. She died on Epiphany Day, January 6, 1925, in Rome (Italy). Her remains rest in the General House of her congregation in that city.
“Many last will be first” (Mt 20, 16)
Pope Pius XII beatified Rafaela María in May 1952. Years later she was canonized by Pope Saint Paul VI, on January 23, 1977.
Rafaela María died on Epiphany Day -an immovable date in the liturgical calendar of many countries-, which is why her feast is celebrated on May 18, the day of her beatification and the transfer of her remains.
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