Fidela Oller Angelats

Fidela Oller Angelats was a Catalan Roman Catholic religious sister and martyr of the Spanish Civil War. She was born on 17 September 1869 in Banyoles, in the province of Girona in Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, a region with a strong Catholic culture and numerous congregations devoted to teaching and the care of the sick. In her youth she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, whose apostolate included education, nursing, and other works of charity. After formation she made religious profession and lived under the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, spending the rest of her life as a sister of that congregation.

For decades she served in the ministries of her community in Catalonia. The Sisters of Saint Joseph conducted schools and small clinics or hospitals, and she is remembered in connection with teaching and the care of the ill. By the 1930s she was a senior member of her house, already in her sixties. Spain in that decade was marked by political polarization, anticlerical measures under the Second Republic, and rising violence against the Church in some areas. Religious communities continued their work under growing pressure.

The Civil War began in July 1936. In Catalonia, which remained under Republican control, a wave of revolutionary and anticlerical violence followed: churches and convents were attacked, and large numbers of priests, nuns, and lay Catholics were imprisoned or killed. Fidela Oller Angelats and two companions of the same congregation, Sisters Josefa Monrabal Giravent and Facunda Margenat Roura, were seized by militiamen. On 30 August 1936 the three sisters were put to death in Barcelona. Fidela was sixty-six years old. The Church later judged that they had been killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith, and numbered them among the Catholic martyrs of that persecution.

Pope Benedict XVI beatified Fidela Oller Angelats on 28 October 2007 in Saint Peter's Square in Rome, together with 497 other martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, then the largest single beatification in the history of the Catholic Church. She is honored as Blessed Fidela Oller Angelats and has not been canonized. Her individual commemoration is associated with the date of her martyrdom, 30 August; the larger group of the 498 Spanish martyrs beatified in 2007 is also liturgically remembered on 6 November. She is invoked among the martyrs of the twentieth-century persecution of the Church in Spain.