The five: Blessed Mary Jesus Masiá Ferragut · Blessed Mary Veronica Masiá Ferragut · Blessed Mary Felicity Masiá Ferragut · Blessed Isabel Calduch Rovira · Blessed Mary Milagros Ortells Gimeno
"My daughters, do not be afraid. It is only a moment, and Heaven will be forever." — Maria Teresa Ferragut Roig, mother of the three Masiá sisters, on the night of October 25, 1936
Women Who Chose to Disappear, and Were Found Anyway
A contemplative nun makes a strange bargain. She gives up marriage, a career, a public name, even the ordinary freedom to walk out of her own front door. She does it so that her whole life can become one long act of prayer for people she will never meet. The world, for the most part, leaves her alone. That is the arrangement.
In the summer of 1936 the arrangement broke. Spain split in two, and across the territory where Valencia lay, churches were burned and priests, religious and ordinary lay Catholics were hunted down simply for what they were. The monasteries were emptied. Women who had spent thirty years behind a grille found themselves on the street in secular clothes, with nowhere to go and a faith that could get them killed.
This is the story of five of them. Three were sisters from one family in the farming town of Algemesí. One was a novice mistress from Castellón who had once walked away from a young man she liked, to become a nun. One was the daughter of a shopkeeping family in Valencia who sat on the floor of the church because she preferred it.
They are for anyone who has been pushed out of the place where they felt safest in their faith. They are for anyone who has wondered what a quiet life of prayer is actually worth. And they are for every family that has tried to hold together when the world outside was falling apart. They did not seek out danger. They tried to keep praying, and that turned out to be enough to get them killed.
Three Towns, One Kind of Home
To understand these women you have to see the country they came from. In the late nineteenth century, the Valencian countryside ran on orange groves, rice fields and small farms. Faith was woven into the calendar: the parish feast, the daily Mass, the procession, the charity of the neighbors. Families were large, and it was normal for a household to give a child to the Church.
Algemesí. The Masiá Ferragut children grew up in a farming family in Algemesí, a town in the province of Valencia. Their mother, Maria Teresa Ferragut Roig, had been born there in 1853 and married Vicente Silverio Masiá in 1872. They had nine children. Maria Teresa went to Mass every day. She was devoted to the Eucharist, to Our Lady and to the Sacred Heart, and for years she served as president of the town's conference of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the lay group that visits and feeds the poor. Their father, Vicente, was remembered as a man of steady prayer. He died in 1916. People in town had a saying about the household: they are all saints in that family.
The saying turned out to be more accurate than they knew. Of the nine children, the only son became a Capuchin friar, taking the name Serafín of Algemesí. Five of the six daughters entered enclosed religious life. Three of them, Vicenta, Joaquina and Maria Felicidad, became Capuchin Poor Clares at the monastery of Agullent, another town in the province.
They were born in Algemesí within eight years of one another: Vicenta on January 12, 1882, Joaquina on June 15, 1884, and Maria Felicidad on August 29, 1890.
Alcalá de Chivert. Josefina Calduch Rovira was born on May 9, 1882, in Alcalá de Chivert, a town in the province of Castellón, to the north. She was the youngest of five children of Francisco Calduch Roures and Amparo Rovira Martí. People remembered a child who was already practical about charity. With a friend, she carried meals to an elderly woman and helped her wash and clean her house. One of her brothers became a priest.
Valencia. Milagros Ortells Gimeno was born in the city of Valencia in November 1882, the third and youngest child of Enrique Ortells and Dolores Gimeno. Her parents owned a well-known shop and workshop that made hand fans on Calle de Zaragoza, in the busiest commercial district of the city. She grew up with money and standing, in a family described as deeply Christian.
Three towns, three families, three levels of comfort. What they share is the Spain of the old parish, where the faith was not a hobby but the shape of the day.
What They Were Like Before They Were Blessed
Nobody becomes a martyr as a blank slate. The records of these women are thin on drama and rich in small, human detail, and those details are worth keeping.
Milagros was the one who refused to fit her class. Her family could afford the clothes and customs of a prosperous Valencian household, but she would not wear the fashionable hat; she wore a shawl instead. In church she would not take a seat on the bench. She sat on the floor, like the poorest worshippers. She went looking for friends among working-class girls. Her penances were severe. A story survives of her mother catching her breathing in a foul smell on purpose, because she could find no other way to mortify herself. This is not the sort of detail a modern reader necessarily admires, and the Church has never asked anyone to copy such extremes. But it shows what kind of person she was: intense, impatient with show, and hungry for something harder than comfort. Alongside this severity she was also described as cheerful, warm and well liked by everyone who knew her.
Isabel was the opposite temperament, or seemed to be: peaceful, kind, always content. But her story contains a quiet cost. In her youth she had been close to a young man in the town, a good Christian by all accounts. She ended it, with her parents' agreement, to pursue what she believed was a more perfect life. Her brother José later said her vocation was the only reason she entered the monastery. She was not running from anything. She gave up something real.
The Masiá sisters grew up inside a family where prayer was normal and vocations were common, and that is its own kind of pressure and its own kind of gift. We have fewer personal details about each of them than we would like. What we do know is that the three of them chose the same strict form of life and stayed in it for decades.
The Day the Cloister Was Opened From Outside
The monastery had been their whole world for thirty-odd years. Each of the five entered young. Isabel received the habit in 1900, at eighteen, and made her solemn vows in 1904. Maria Jesus made her profession at Agullent in 1900. Milagros entered the Capuchin Poor Clares of Valencia on October 9, 1902.
When the military uprising of July 1936 plunged Spain into civil war, the Valencian region stayed under the control of the Republic, and with the outbreak came a wave of violence against the Church. Thousands of priests, religious and laypeople were killed across the country over the following months. Convents and churches were stripped, burned or turned to other uses.
The five were forced out. The sisters of Agullent left their monastery. Milagros, who had already been driven from her convent twice during the troubled years before the war, left Valencia's monastery again. Isabel left Castellón.
It is worth pausing on what this meant for women of their kind. A Poor Clare's day is built on a rhythm: the Divine Office in choir, silence, manual work, shared meals, a bell for everything. Take that away and you have not just displaced a person. You have taken apart the structure that held her up. There were no authorities to appeal to, no bishop to call. They had to decide each morning what a nun is when there is no monastery.
All three groups went home.
Why a Woman Walks Into a Monastery
To see what was being taken, it helps to go back to why they went in.
Milagros chose the Capuchin Poor Clares on purpose, for their severity. Her mother had suggested another community, an easier one. She said no. She wanted, in the words of a sister who knew her, the great strictness of the Capuchin rule. When she entered in Valencia she did so with great enthusiasm, and the sisters who lived with her afterward remembered how fully she meant it.
Isabel went in after the painful choice described above, and she carried no regrets that anyone noticed. She became known for a quiet interior life centered on the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lady, and John the Baptist, whose own life of hiddenness and witness seems to have spoken to her.
The Masiá sisters came from a home where daily Mass and charity were ordinary, and for them the monastery looks like a continuation of that home rather than an escape from it. We know less about their individual decisions than we would like.
None of this was sentimental. The Capuchin reform of the Poor Clares, which began in sixteenth-century Naples, is one of the strictest forms of women's religious life in the Franciscan family: poverty, penance, silence, and long hours of prayer. A woman who chose it was choosing something that most of her neighbors would have found baffling even then. What gave their choice its weight was not the hardship but the center of it. They believed that a human being could belong entirely to Christ, and that this belonging was a gift to everyone else.
What a Hidden Life Builds
The apostolate of an enclosed nun does not look like much from outside. There are no hospitals to point to, no books, no schools. But these five women were not idle.
They formed other women. Both Isabel and Milagros served as novice mistress, the nun responsible for teaching new arrivals how to live the rule and how to pray. Isabel did it with such evenness that a sister recalled she made no distinction between the novices: no favorites, no pets. Her term was renewed for a further three years, and it was cut short only by the war.
They kept the house running. Milagros held, over the years, nearly every office in the monastery: infirmarian (caring for the sick sisters), portress at the turn (the rotating window through which the monastery met the outside world), sacristan (looking after the chapel and sacred vessels), and novice mistress. She was described as always willing to help, always the one who offered to take on a task for another sister. After midnight prayer she often stayed behind a little in the chapel, to add a penance the rule did not require.
They prayed. The Masiá sisters and the others spent decades at the center of what Poor Clares do: standing before the Blessed Sacrament on behalf of everyone who could not or would not. Their prayer was not an escape from the world's troubles. It was the part of the work that no one else was doing.
They carried it home. And when the monasteries closed, they did not stop. The Masiá sisters, together with their sister Josefa, a Discalced Augustinian nun who had also been driven from her convent, went home to their mother's house in Algemesí. For several months, under one roof, five women tried to live as monastic a life as they could: prayer, recollection, silence. Isabel did the same in her hometown, living in retreat and prayer. Milagros took refuge in her sister's house in Valencia, then in another house on the Calle Maestro Chapí, and kept up her prayer and her recollection there.
It was the cloister reduced to its core: a household, a rule of life, a quiet way of living. It lasted until someone knocked on the door.
Found
Hiding is a poor word for it. They were not concealing anything illegal. They were simply being what they had always been, and in the autumn of 1936 that was enough.
The Masiá family. On October 19, 1936, a group of militiamen came to the house in Algemesí. They arrested the four religious daughters. Maria Teresa, now eighty-three years old, could have stayed behind. She was a widow, a lay woman, and an old one. She refused to leave her daughters and was taken with them.
They were held in a former Cistercian convent in Algemesí, Fons Salutis, which had been turned into a prison. The irony is hard to miss: women who had asked only for a convent were now locked in one that no longer served its purpose. While they were held, their captors pressed them to give up their religious vocation. They refused.
Here the story has a human complication it would be dishonest to hide. Fear was real. The beatification letter that raised many of these martyrs to the altar describes the inner state of the group with unusual frankness: the dread of death pressed on them, and so did the doubt about whether they would hold firm. What got them through, it says, was a simple sentence repeated again and again: if God wants me to be a martyr, he will give me the strength. They did not feel strong. They asked for strength to be given.
Isabel. In her hometown of Alcalá de Chivert, Isabel was arrested on April 13, 1937, along with a Franciscan priest, Fr. Manuel Geli. She was brought to the local committee and was injured and mistreated there. Her brother, the priest who had sheltered her, would also later be killed.
Milagros. On November 20, 1936, a group of militiamen came for Milagros at the house on Calle Maestro Chapí. She had spent most of her adult life choosing hardship in advance. Now it came without her choosing.
Three Places, One Ending
The deaths of these five happened in three different places over about six months. They share one shape.
October 25, 1936 — Cruz Cubierta, near Alzira. On the night of October 25, the four women were loaded onto a truck. The road ran about eight kilometers from Algemesí to the edge of the neighboring town of Alzira, to a spot called Cruz Cubierta, where a small covered shrine with a cross stands beside the road. Local tradition ties the place to the death of King James I of Aragon, the great medieval conqueror of Valencia. It was an ordinary roadside. It was about to become something else.
They were shot one after another. Maria Teresa asked to go last. She wanted to be there for her daughters, to speak to them until the end. This is where her words come from, the ones at the head of this article: My daughters, do not be afraid. It is only a moment, and Heaven will be forever. Then, according to the record preserved from their cause, the daughters cried out Long live Christ the King! and forgave the people who killed them. Maria Teresa was shot last.
Three of the daughters, Maria Jesus (54), Maria Veronica (52) and Maria Felicity (46), are the Poor Clares in this article. Their sister Josefa, the Augustinian, and their mother were killed beside them, and the Church has beatified both as well.
November 20, 1936 — Picadero de Paterna, near Valencia. Milagros was taken that evening, a Friday, with a group of other religious sisters, forced into a vehicle, and driven to the Picadero de Paterna, a place outside Valencia used for executions. She was fifty-three years old. The details of how she was treated are known, in part, because a forensic study was later carried out from photographs of her body. It confirms that her death was brutal. This article will not dwell on it, but it should not be softened either: she did not die quietly. She died as the others did, for no reason except that she was a nun. She was buried in the cemetery of Valencia.
April 14, 1937 — Cuevas de Vinromà. The day after her arrest, Isabel was killed in the district of Cuevas de Vinromà. She was fifty-four. She was buried in the cemetery there. She had been the peaceful one, the one always content, who never made distinctions between her novices. Her last day was spent in the hands of men who injured and mistreated her.
What links these four scenes is not heroism in the cinematic sense. No one in them argued their way free or delivered a speech. They did what they had spent their lives learning to do: they stayed where they were, they prayed, and they did not give up their faith when asked to.
What Was Done With Their Bodies, and What the Church Said
The bodies of the three Masiá sisters, their sister Josefa and their mother were taken first to the cemetery of Alzira. On July 2, 1939, after the war ended, they were moved to Algemesí and placed in the crypt of the same Fons Salutis convent where they had been held prisoner. On April 16, 1961, they were moved again, to the parish church of Saint Pius X in Algemesí, where they are venerated today.
Milagros was exhumed on April 30, 1940, and returned to the Capuchin Poor Clare monastery in Valencia, the house she had entered in 1902. She rests there now. She went back to the cloister.
The Church examined their deaths carefully, as it does with every martyr. The question is never simply whether someone was killed. It is whether they were killed in hatred of the faith, and whether they accepted death rather than abandon it. In 1999 the Congregation for the Causes of Saints concluded that they had been, and on March 11, 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified them in St. Peter's Square in Rome, as part of a group of 233 martyrs of the persecution in Spain. In his homily he singled out the mother, Maria Teresa, for special mention: she asked to be shot last so that she could encourage her daughters.
The Capuchin calendar remembers the Masiá sisters, and with them their four companions, on October 25, the day of the executions at Cruz Cubierta.
What Their Witness Is For
On patronage. The Church has not assigned a formal patronage to these five, and it would be false to invent one. What can be said, honestly, is what their lives speak to.
- Families who pray together. The Masiá household produced a friar, five nuns and a mother who walked to her death beside four of her children. A family that had spent decades teaching its children to pray did not fall apart when it mattered.
- People who have lost their spiritual home. Whoever has been pushed out of a church, a community or a routine of faith, by war, by exile, by illness, or simply by upheaval, can look at women who rebuilt the cloister in a family home, a hometown retreat and a borrowed house, and kept praying.
- The hidden and the overlooked. Not one of these women was famous. Their work was prayer, teaching novices, nursing sick sisters, tending the chapel. The Church's decision to name them Blessed says something to everyone who suspects that a quiet, unnoticed life does not matter.
- Those who have been afraid. The martyrs themselves did not claim to be fearless. They were frightened, and they trusted that strength would be given when it was needed. That is a thing a frightened person can use.
On their cause. Their deaths took place in the setting of a bitter civil war, and it is possible to misuse their memory by turning it into a weapon in an argument about politics. The Church does not do that. It recognized them as martyrs because of what was asked of them and what they refused: they were killed for being religious women, and they would not give up their consecration. They forgave the people who killed them. Their memory is not a call for revenge. It is a call for the kind of faith that prefers to be forgiving.
On what remains. Their relics are venerated in two places, in Algemesí and in Valencia. The Poor Clare monastery of Valencia still holds the remains of Milagros. The parish of Saint Pius X in Algemesí keeps the remains of the mother and her four daughters in one place, as they were in life.
At a Glance
| Born | Mary Jesus (Vicenta) Masiá Ferragut: January 12, 1882, Algemesí, Valencia<br>Mary Veronica (Joaquina) Masiá Ferragut: June 15, 1884, Algemesí, Valencia<br>Mary Felicity Masiá Ferragut: August 29, 1890, Algemesí, Valencia<br>Isabel (Josefina) Calduch Rovira: May 9, 1882, Alcalá de Chivert, Castellón<br>Mary Milagros Ortells Gimeno: November 1882, Valencia |
| Died | The three Masiá sisters: October 25, 1936, Cruz Cubierta, Alzira, Valencia — shot, with their mother and sister<br>Mary Milagros: November 20, 1936, Picadero de Paterna, Valencia — shot<br>Isabel: April 14, 1937, Cuevas de Vinromà, Castellón — killed after arrest on April 13 |
| Feast Day | October 25 (shared feast in the Capuchin calendar) |
| Order / Vocation | Capuchin Poor Clares (enclosed contemplative nuns) |
| Monasteries | Agullent (the three Masiá sisters) · Castellón de la Plana (Isabel) · Valencia (Milagros) |
| Beatified | March 11, 2001 — Pope John Paul II |
| Canonized | Not canonized |
| Body | The Masiá sisters: parish church of Saint Pius X, Algemesí (moved there April 16, 1961) · Milagros: Capuchin Poor Clare monastery, Valencia (moved there April 30, 1940) · Isabel: first buried in the cemetery of Cuevas de Vinromà |
| Patron of | No formal patronage assigned |
| Known as | The Poor Clare Martyrs of Valencia · Martyrs of Cruz Cubierta (the Masiá sisters) |
| Companions beatified the same day | Their mother, Blessed Maria Teresa Ferragut Roig · their sister, Blessed Josefa de la Purificación Masiá Ferragut (Discalced Augustinian) |
| Their words | "Long live Christ the King!" (the Masiá sisters, at Cruz Cubierta) |
Prayer
Almighty God, you gave to Blessed Mary Jesus and her companions the double crown of virginity and martyrdom. Grant that through their intercession we may persevere in genuine charity and know the power of the resurrection of Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Sources
- Apostolic Letter Afflictus est, Pope John Paul II, March 11, 2001 (Holy See)
- Homily of Pope John Paul II at the beatification of José Aparicio Sanz and 232 companions, March 11, 2001
- Acta Apostolicae Sedis 93 (2001)
- Capuchin Franciscans (Province of St. Mary), "Blessed Maria Jesus Masia Ferragut and Companions"
- CapDox (Capuchin Friars Australia), biographies of Blessed Isabel Calduch Rovira, Blessed Maria Milagros Ortelles Gimeno, and Blessed Maria Teresa Ferragud Roig
- Royal Academy of History, Diccionario Biográfico Español, "Beata Isabel Calduch"
- A. Martínez Cuesta, "Beata Josefa Masiá de la Purificación, 1887–1936" (Augustinian Recollects)
- A. Ramírez Peralbo, OFM Cap., "Mártires Capuchinos de Valencia," Bollettino di Informazioni Cappuccine Internazionali 155 (2001)
- M. E. González Rodríguez, Los primeros 479 santos y beatos mártires del siglo XX en España (Madrid: Edice, 2008)
- Order of St. Augustine (Augustinian Order), memorial of Blessed Josefa de la Purificación Masià Ferragut
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