The Sisters of Our Lady of Consolation are a religious Congregation born in 1857 in Tortosa founded by Maria Rosa Molas, whose purpose is to be an instrument of mercy to the most disadvantaged, through our apostolic works.
We are called to generate fraternity, embrace human fragility and vulnerability, fostering a new lifestyle woven of reconciled relationships. That mission has accompanied us from our beginnings to the present day, being Masters in Humanity.
The charism of Consolation is now spreading throughout Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia with educational, socio-health, and other works and presences where consolation is urgently needed.
Our Mission is to Console, to be at the side of those who need it most. It is to take care of people and also of the world in which we live, our common home. It is to develop relationships of love, respect, and dignity with the neighbors.
The traits that define our Charism are:
- The look of everyday reality from the experience of God. To see God in all things as a presence that lives in us and helps us to live in communion.
- Humility to connect with the earth and with the deepest part of our being, to put ourselves in the place of the other, to accompany, understand, and accept without judging.
- Fervent Charity to develop our charism, to embody the response to the call of God that continues to resound in history: "Console, console my people” (Is 40,1)
- Compassion for others with a heart of mercy and service to the poor.
- The Prophetic audacity, the faith to be witnesses of the life that springs up amid darkness, even when everything seems lost.
OUR FOUNDRESS SAINT MARÍA ROSA MOLAS
On 24 March 1815, on the night of Maundy Thursday to Good Friday, Rosa Francisca María de los Dolores, Doloretes, was born in Reus (as she was called by her father and main spiritual director, José Molas, and her mother, María Vallvé, from whom she learned to love as heroic self-giving to the point of giving her life).
Her profound experience of God, her great sensitivity to human misery, her unreserved dedication, and the leadership capacity that she showed from childhood led Doloretes to the hospital of Saint John in Reus, where she began her consecrated life to the service of God already as María Rosa.
María Rosa's life from her childhood, through adolescence to her youth and adulthood, marked a process of human and spiritual growth that led her to fulfillment.
In her service to the poorest, she took on difficult responsibilities and tasks. She embraced everything with simplicity, humility, and love, with gentleness and firmness, developing her capacities for the service of God in every suffering brother and sister. With great fidelity, she went through personal dryness, illnesses, social turbulences... Until the day of her departure to the heavenly banquet on 11 June 1876. The Church declared her a saint in 1988 and since then she has been a model for all Christians.
In the history of the Congregation, other sisters followed in her footsteps: María Teresa González Justo declared a model of heroic virtues and in the process of beatification, as well as Eufrosina Pachés and Fernandina Besalduch, martyrs during the dark and painful period of the Spanish civil war.
All of them remind us of and exhort us to holiness in living the charism. They "are like us, like all of us", they have lived "a normal life", but they have "known the love of God" and "have followed it unconditionally, without limits or hypocrisy".
VENERABLE MARÍA TERESA GONZÁLEZ JUSTO
On February 11, 1921, Francisca, known as "Paquita", was born in Quintanar de la Orden, in a Christian, honest, and hard-working family, a kind and calm-tempered girl.
As she said, "love and forgiveness must be demonstrated with deeds". That is why every day she visited her father's murderer in prison with a basket of food and the message of God's infinite mercy.
At the age of 20, she entered the Sisters of Consolation and we know her as María Teresa. She was called 'Sister Joy' because of her prudent, simple, kind, and humble character.
Destined to the Sanatorium of Villarreal (Castellón), she felt that the Lord wanted her to be with the poorest, with the world of pain. There she accompanied the sick, shared their food, and consoled their sadness for 23 years, until her death on October 12, 1967.
The heroic virtues of Venerable María Teresa Gonzalez Justo were declared on June 13, 1992, by St. John Paul II.
MARTYR SISTERS
Eufrosina Pachés was a good woman, courageous, austere, and dedicated to the service of others. She dedicated herself as a Sister of Consolation for 43 years to the care of the sick in the Charity of Castellón, in the Orphan's Home of this city, as well as in the Asylum-Hospital of Benicarló and the Hospital of Villarreal. A woman of experience and proven virtue, she always had a consoling gesture towards those in need of her care.
Fernandina Besalduch was entrusted with her evangelizing mission in the field of Christian education of girls tirelessly and enthusiastically, being an example of total availability to God and her brothers and sisters. Those who passed through her class at the Consolation School of Burriana, where she worked for 14 years, emphasize that she was an excellent nursery school teacher with a true passion for her children. "With her, I began my steps towards God", her students tell us, among whom she left her mark.
Both gave their lives to "love and make Jesus Christ loved and to serve Him in the poor" as Sisters of Consolation. The vocation united them, and also martyrdom, losing their lives during the summer of 1936 for their being religious.
