Arcàngela Badosa i Cuatrecasas

Arcàngela Badosa i Cuatrecasas was a Catalan Catholic religious sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Anne. She was born on 8 September 1878 in Sant Joan les Fonts, in the Garrotxa comarca of the province of Girona, Catalonia, Spain. Readily available historical sources give almost no information about her parents, siblings, or childhood beyond the fact that she was raised in a Catholic rural milieu typical of late-nineteenth-century Catalonia. In young adulthood she entered the Sisters of Charity of Saint Anne, a Spanish congregation founded in the early nineteenth century whose members were dedicated especially to nursing the sick and serving the poor in hospitals and related charitable works.

After religious formation she was assigned to hospital ministry in Barcelona. She served as a nurse at the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, a major historic hospital of the city where her congregation maintained a presence. Her work consisted of the ordinary, physically demanding care of patients according to the medical standards and limited resources of the early twentieth century, carried out in keeping with the nursing charism of her institute.

In 1918 the influenza pandemic known as the Spanish flu struck Catalonia with great severity and filled Barcelona’s hospitals. Sister Arcàngela continued to attend the sick during the outbreak. She contracted the disease herself while caring for influenza patients and died in Barcelona on 5 November 1918 at the age of forty.

She remains an obscure figure outside limited Catalan Catholic and congregational circles. She has not been beatified or canonized, and no official feast day or list of patronages is attached to her in standard liturgical or hagiographic sources. Notices of her life stress her death in the course of nursing the victims of the 1918 pandemic as an instance of charitable self-gift. Further particulars of her interior life, any writings, or possible local devotion, if they exist, appear to rest in unpublished archives of her congregation or of the Archdiocese of Barcelona rather than in widely published historical literature.