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Biography

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Dora del Hoyo Alonso was born on 11 January 1914 in Boca de Huérgano, a small rural village in the mountains of the province of León in northwestern Spain. She belonged to a Catholic family of modest means and received only a basic education, as was common for girls of her social background in that region in the early twentieth century. From adolescence she earned her living in domestic service, first in her native district and later in larger households. In the years after the Spanish Civil War she went to Madrid, where she continued to work as a household employee. Her early life left no public writings and no ecclesiastical office; what later writers emphasize is the continuity between this ordinary labor and the spiritual path she would follow for the rest of her life.

In Madrid in the mid-1940s she came into contact with Opus Dei, the apostolic work founded by the priest Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, which taught that ordinary professional work and the circumstances of daily life could be a path to holiness for lay people. She asked to join Opus Dei on 14 March 1946 and became the first numerary assistant: a lay vocation within the institution consisting of women who live celibacy and dedicate themselves professionally to the domestic administration of its centers. In December 1946 she moved to Rome with the founder as he established the central government of Opus Dei in the city. She remained in Rome for the rest of her life, more than fifty-seven years, working in the kitchens, laundry, and household organization of the central houses, including the complex later known as Villa Tevere.

Those who lived with her described a hidden, regular life of professional domestic work joined to a serious practice of prayer, the sacraments, and the norms of piety of Opus Dei. In the spirituality of the prelature, cooking, cleaning, and the care of a house are not presented as inferior occupations but as honest work that can be offered to God and that serves the people who live and work in those houses. Del Hoyo became, for many members, a concrete example of that teaching. She held no public Church office, did not found an order, and left no body of published spiritual writings comparable to those of Escrivá; her reputation for holiness grew from the testimony of people who had known her over decades in Rome rather than from miracles publicized in her lifetime or from a cultus organized around a tomb during her life.

She died in Rome on 10 January 2004, the day before her ninetieth birthday. Her funeral was celebrated in the Prelatic Church of Our Lady of Peace, the church of the prelate of Opus Dei. In 2012 the Holy See granted the nihil obstat for a cause of beatification and canonization, and the diocesan process was opened in Rome; she is therefore styled a Servant of God. She has not been beatified or canonized, and the Church has assigned her no feast day and no official patronages. Her remains rest in the crypt of the Prelatic Church of Our Lady of Peace at the central headquarters of Opus Dei in Rome.

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