Joaquim Rosselló i Ferrà

Joaquim Rosselló i Ferrà was a Roman Catholic priest of Mallorca and the founder of the Missionaries of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (Missioners dels Sagrats Cors). He was born in Palma de Mallorca, in Spain’s Balearic Islands, on 28 June 1833. Formed for the diocesan priesthood at the Conciliar Seminary of Mallorca, he was ordained in 1858 for the Diocese of Mallorca. His first decades of ministry were those of a secular priest: parish work on the island, preaching, and the ordinary care of souls. In the religious climate of nineteenth-century Mallorca he became known for personal austerity, attention to the poor, and a spirituality centered on the Eucharist and on the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

He was especially active as a preacher of popular missions and retreats, a form of parish renewal then widely used in the Spanish Church. That apostolate, together with a desire for a more regular common life, gradually gathered companions around him. In 1890 he founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, establishing its first house at the Marian sanctuary and hermitage of the Puig de Maria, a hill above Pollença in northern Mallorca long associated with pilgrimage to Our Lady. The new institute joined community prayer to missionary preaching and to the promotion of devotion to the Sacred Hearts. Rosselló served as its first superior and spent his remaining years forming members and consolidating the foundation, which belongs to the broader nineteenth-century flowering of Sacred Heart congregations and popular-mission institutes.

He died at the Puig de Maria on 20 December 1909. A reputation for holiness persisted in Mallorca and within the congregation. A cause for beatification was later introduced, and on 21 December 1989 Pope John Paul II approved the decree on his heroic virtues, conferring the title Venerable. He has not been beatified or canonized and has no feast in the universal calendar. His historical importance is local and congregational: a diocesan priest of Mallorca who became a religious founder, remembered for missionary preaching and for devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.