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Biography

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Florentina Nicol y Goñi was born in 1868 in Tafalla, in Navarre in northern Spain, and was baptized under that given name. She received her schooling from Dominican sisters and in the mid-1880s entered the Dominican community of Santa Rosa in Huesca, in Aragon, taking the religious name María Ascensión of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She made profession as a Dominican sister in that house, which conducted a school for girls, and belonged to the regular life of choir, community, and classroom rather than to a cloistered monastery in the strictest sense.

For many years she taught in the Huesca school. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain was marked by conflict between the Church and secularizing governments, and religious teaching congregations often worked under legal and social pressure. Within that setting she formed pupils in Christian doctrine and ordinary school subjects according to Dominican educational custom. Her later willingness to leave Spain for the missions grew out of that teaching apostolate and out of the older Dominican tradition of itinerant preaching, not from a sudden change of state: she remained a vowed religious when she crossed the Atlantic.

In 1913 Bishop Ramón Zubieta y Les, a Dominican and Apostolic Vicar of Puerto Maldonado in the Peruvian Amazon, asked for sisters to work among indigenous peoples of the rainforest. Mother Ascensión was sent as superior of a small group from Huesca. They established themselves in the Amazon basin, in a region of difficult travel, tropical disease, and great cultural distance from Navarre and Aragon. The sisters opened mission stations and schools, instructed children and adults, and tried to accompany scattered communities while keeping the Dominican pattern of prayer and study. Contemporary accounts stress hardship and isolation more than spectacular conversions.

The needs of that apostolate led Mother Ascensión and Bishop Zubieta to found a new institute, the Congregation of the Dominican Missionaries of the Rosary, in 1918. It was to be missionary by design, directed especially to evangelization and education among the poor and indigenous, while remaining inside the Dominican family. She became its first superior general and spent the rest of her life opening houses, forming sisters, and defending the missionary character of the congregation. She divided later years between Peru and Spain as the community took root.

She died in Pamplona in 1940. Pope John Paul II beatified her in Rome on 14 May 2005. The Catholic Church keeps her memorial on 24 February, the anniversary of her death. She has not been canonized. The congregation she founded continues missionary and educational work, especially in Latin America. Historical sources present her as a teacher who became a missionary foundress; her principal legacy is the institute itself rather than a large body of writings.

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