María Inés Teresa Arias

María Inés Teresa Arias, born Manuela de Jesús Arias Espinosa on 7 July 1904 in Ixtlán del Río in the western Mexican state of Nayarit, was a Roman Catholic religious sister and foundress of the twentieth century. She was one of eight children of Manuel Arias Maldonado and María Espinosa López Portillo, in a devout Catholic household. She was baptized in infancy in 1904 and confirmed shortly thereafter. Her father died in 1910, when she was still a young child. She grew up during the Mexican Revolution and the years of tension between Church and state that followed, including the period associated with the Cristero conflict. Contemporary accounts of her early life emphasize piety, a strong Eucharistic devotion, and an emerging sense of vocation to consecrated life rather than marriage or a secular career.

In 1929 she entered a monastery of the Poor Clares (Order of Saint Clare) in Mexico and took the religious name María Inés Teresa of the Blessed Sacrament (María Inés Teresa del Santísimo Sacramento). She made her first profession in 1930 and later her solemn profession as a Poor Clare. After years of contemplative Franciscan-Clarian life, she became convinced that the Poor Clare charism of poverty, enclosure, and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament could also be lived in an active missionary form. On 23 August 1945, in Cuernavaca, she founded the Poor Clare Missionary Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (Congregación de Misioneras Clarisas del Santísimo Sacramento). The new institute sought to unite contemplative Eucharistic spirituality with missionary and educational work. It received a decree of praise from the Holy See in the early 1950s and later obtained pontifical approval. She also promoted related missionary initiatives, including work sometimes described as the Missionaries of Christ for the Universal Church, intended to extend the same spirit among priests and lay collaborators.

As foundress and superior, she directed the expansion of the congregation beyond Mexico to other parts of Latin America, the United States, Asia (including Japan and Indonesia), Africa, and Europe. She traveled extensively to open houses, form sisters, and keep the community’s identity rooted in Poor Clare poverty, community life, and devotion to the Eucharist rather than in mere institutional growth. In her later years she spent prolonged periods in Rome in connection with the government of the congregation and its dealings with the Holy See. Those who knew her described a combination of missionary energy with a contemplative temperament; she remained identified with the religious name she had taken as a Poor Clare and with the Blessed Sacrament as the center of the congregation’s spirituality.

She died in Rome on 22 July 1981. A cause for beatification was introduced after her death. She was declared Venerable after a decree of heroic virtues, and Pope Benedict XVI subsequently recognized a miracle attributed to her intercession. She was beatified on 21 April 2012 at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, in a ceremony presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato as delegate of Pope Benedict XVI. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 22 July, the anniversary of her death. She has not been canonized. In Catholic usage she is known as Blessed María Inés Teresa of the Blessed Sacrament (or Blessed Manuela de Jesús Arias Espinosa), foundress of the Poor Clare Missionary Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.