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Biography

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Matilde Téllez Robles, known in religion as Matilde of the Sacred Heart, was born on 30 May 1841 in Robledillo de la Vera, a town in the province of Cáceres in Extremadura, Spain. She was the daughter of Fernando Téllez and Basilea Robles. While she was still a child the family moved, first to Béjar and later to Don Benito in the province of Badajoz, which became her lifelong home. From her youth she was noted for piety, charity, and a desire to consecrate herself to God. During a cholera epidemic that struck the region in the 1850s she helped care for the sick, an experience that confirmed her attraction to works of mercy. Her father at first opposed her wish to enter religious life, and she therefore remained in the family home while making a private vow of chastity and taking part in parish associations devoted to the Virgin Mary.

In the 1870s Matilde gathered a small group of companions who shared her desire to live in community and to serve the poor, the sick, and girls in need of education. On 19 March 1875, the feast of Saint Joseph, they began common life in a house in Don Benito, founding what would become the Congregation of the Daughters of Mary, Mother of the Church. The new institute combined a life of prayer with an active apostolate of teaching, care of orphans, home nursing, and assistance to the needy in the social conditions of rural Extremadura in the late nineteenth century. Matilde took the religious name Matilde of the Sacred Heart and served as the first superior, forming the sisters in a spirit of humility, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to Mary, and trust in providence amid poverty and the ordinary difficulties of a newly founded community.

Under her leadership the congregation obtained diocesan approval and gradually expanded its works. The sisters opened schools and workshops for girls, attended the sick in their homes, and undertook other charitable activities among the poor. Matilde governed the community for the remainder of her life, even as her own health declined in later years. She was regarded by those who knew her as a woman of deep interior life joined to practical charity. She died in Don Benito on 17 December 1902 after receiving the sacraments of the Church.

After her death the congregation continued to develop and later received pontifical recognition. The cause for her beatification was introduced in due course; she was declared Venerable and then beatified by Pope John Paul II on 21 March 2004. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 17 December. She is remembered especially as foundress of her congregation and as a model of consecrated life and service to the poor in nineteenth-century Spain.

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