Francisco Simón y Ródenas

Francisco Simón y Ródenas was a Spanish Capuchin friar and Roman Catholic bishop associated with the missions of northern Colombia in the late nineteenth century. He was born on 2 October 1848 in Villarrobledo, in the province of Albacete in Castile-La Mancha, Spain. He entered the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, the observant Franciscan reform known for austerity, popular preaching, and missionary work, and was ordained a priest in that order. Like many Spanish Capuchins of his generation, he was sent to the American missions rather than remaining in a purely domestic apostolate.

In Colombia the Capuchins had a substantial presence on the Caribbean coast and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where they worked among indigenous communities as well as in colonial-era towns. Simón y Ródenas took part in that missionary effort in the Diocese of Santa Marta, a see erected in the sixteenth century and one of the oldest in the Americas. The territory combined the port city of Santa Marta with a difficult hinterland of river valleys and mountains, sparse infrastructure, and the social and political instability of Colombia after independence. Capuchin work in the Sierra Nevada involved evangelization, the founding or staffing of mission stations and parishes, and contact with indigenous groups of the massif.

In 1898 Pope Leo XIII appointed him Bishop of Santa Marta. He received episcopal consecration that same year and thus became ordinary of the diocese. His residential episcopate was short. In 1901 he resigned the see of Santa Marta and was named titular bishop of Echinus, a common arrangement when a bishop left a residential diocese but retained episcopal rank. Available standard sources do not always spell out in detail the motives for the resignation; health, the hardships of the mission, or the ecclesiastical circumstances of the moment are the kinds of factors typically involved in such transfers, but they should not be asserted beyond what the record clearly states.

After leaving Santa Marta he returned to Spain. He spent his later years in connection with the Capuchin community and died in Murcia on 22 August 1914. He was not beatified or canonized, and no feast day or official patronages are attached to his name in the liturgical books of the Catholic Church. His historical interest lies in the Capuchin missions of the Colombian Caribbean and Sierra Nevada and in the episcopal succession of Santa Marta at the close of the nineteenth century, rather than in any later cult or widespread popular devotion.