María de la Purísima de la Cruz

María Isabel Salvat Romero, known in religion as María de la Purísima de la Cruz, was born in Madrid on 20 February 1926, the third of eight children of Ricardo Salvat Albert and Margarita Romero Ferrer. Her family belonged to the Catholic professional class of the Spanish capital and was of comfortable means. The Spanish Civil War, which began when she was ten, forced the household to leave Madrid; they lived in several places for the duration of the conflict and returned only after 1939. In adolescence she received the education customary for a girl of her background and was remembered as intelligent, energetic, and already drawn to prayer and works of mercy. The apostolate of the Sisters of the Company of the Cross—women who went into the dwellings of the poorest and the sick rather than waiting for them in institutions—made a lasting impression on her and shaped her sense of vocation.

She entered the novitiate of that congregation in Seville on 8 December 1944, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and received the name María de la Purísima de la Cruz. The institute, also called the Sisters of the Cross, had been founded in Seville in the late nineteenth century by Saint Angela of the Cross (Ángela Guerrero González) to serve the destitute and the ill whom hospitals and asylums did not reach. Its members lived poorly and combined a hidden life of prayer with daily visits to the homes of those they served. María de la Purísima made temporary vows in 1947 and perpetual vows in 1952. In the following years she was assigned to various houses of the congregation, where she shared in domestic work, the nursing of the poor, and the regular observance of the rule. Those who knew her in this period spoke of her fidelity to the founder’s spirit, her patience with the suffering, and her resistance to any softening of the congregation’s original poverty and availability.

In 1977 a general chapter elected her Superior General. She was re-elected in later chapters and remained at the head of the institute until her death, a tenure of more than twenty years. Her government fell in the decades after the Second Vatican Council, when religious congregations were required to revise their constitutions and re-examine their works. She oversaw that renewal while insisting that the sisters not abandon the homes of the poor for more conventional institutional apostolates. Under her leadership new foundations were established and the congregation’s presence was consolidated in Spain and elsewhere. She was known for Marian and Eucharistic piety, personal austerity, and an administrative firmness that did not exclude kindness. Declining health marked her later years, yet she continued to exercise her office until the end.

She died in Seville on 31 October 1998. A reputation for holiness attached to her memory almost immediately, and a canonical process was introduced. She was beatified in Seville on 18 September 2010 by Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, acting in the name of Pope Benedict XVI, and was canonized by Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s Square on 18 October 2015. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 31 October, the anniversary of her death. She is venerated especially by the Sisters of the Company of the Cross and in Seville and Andalusia as a twentieth-century witness to evangelical charity toward the sick and the socially forgotten.