Maria Vicenta Masia Ferragut

Maria Vicenta Masia Ferragut was born in 1882 in Algemesí, a town in the province of Valencia in eastern Spain. She was a daughter of Teresa Ferragud Roig, a devout Catholic who would later share her daughter's martyrdom. Raised in a household marked by traditional Valencian Catholic practice, she entered the contemplative Order of Augustinian Recollect nuns and took the religious name Sister María Vicenta of Saint Dorothy. She lived the enclosed life of prayer and work according to the Rule of Saint Augustine as followed by the Recollect sisters, in a community in the Valencian region associated with the monastery of the Augustinian Recollects at Benigànim. Several of her blood sisters likewise became Augustinian Recollect nuns.

When the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936, an intense anticlerical persecution swept the Republican zone, including Valencia. Monasteries were suppressed and religious were expelled or forced into hiding. Maria Vicenta and her sisters in religion left the convent and took refuge in the family home in Algemesí, where their mother sheltered them. They attempted to live inconspicuously, but their identity as nuns was known locally. In October 1936, militiamen arrested the women of the Masia Ferragut family.

Maria Vicenta, her mother Teresa Ferragud, and her sisters were imprisoned and then killed without a regular trial, in the manner of many extrajudicial executions of clergy and religious during those months. They were shot on 25 October 1936. Maria Vicenta was fifty-four years old. The place of execution is identified with the area of Cruz Cubierta in the municipality of Alzira, near their native Algemesí. Their deaths belong to the large number of Catholics killed in the Archdiocese of Valencia in 1936, in what the Church later judged to have been a persecution in hatred of the faith.

On 11 March 2001, Pope John Paul II beatified Maria Vicenta Masia Ferragut in Saint Peter's Square in Rome, together with 232 other martyrs of the religious persecution in Spain in the 1930s, a group often called the 233 Spanish Martyrs. She has not been canonized and is venerated as Blessed. Her memory is observed especially by the Augustinian Recollect family and in the local church of Valencia. The date associated with her feast is 25 October, the day of her martyrdom, alongside the collective commemorations of the twentieth-century Spanish martyrs.