Mother Hope of Jesus

Maria Josefa Alhama Valera, known in religion as Mother Hope of Jesus (Madre Esperanza de Jesús), was born on 30 September 1893 in Santomera, in the Region of Murcia in southeastern Spain. She grew up in a large and economically modest family and from childhood combined ordinary labor with a strong interior piety and a desire for consecrated life. In 1914 she entered the Congregation of the Daughters of Calvary and received the name Sister Esperanza of Jesus. That community later united with the Claretian Missionary Sisters. During these years she became convinced that she was called to make known the Merciful Love of God, a devotion that would define her later foundations and teaching.

On 24 December 1930, in Madrid, she founded the Congregation of the Handmaids of Merciful Love (Esclavas del Amor Misericordioso). The new institute was to live a life of prayer and apostolic charity centered on divine mercy, serving the poor and spreading that devotion in the Church. The Spanish Civil War and the anticlerical violence of the 1930s made it impossible to develop the work safely in Spain. In 1936 she went to Italy and re-established the congregation in Rome and elsewhere in the country. In 1951 she founded a companion male institute, the Sons of Merciful Love (Figli dell'Amore Misericordioso), of priests and brothers. Both congregations received diocesan approval and later pontifical recognition and spread beyond Italy and Spain.

From the early 1950s her principal project was the Sanctuary of Merciful Love at Collevalenza, a locality near Todi in Umbria. She acquired land and oversaw construction of a large modern church and an adjoining religious complex intended as a place of pilgrimage dedicated to God's mercy. On 22 November 1981 Pope John Paul II visited the sanctuary, publicly associated it with the message of Merciful Love, and thereby gave the site a notable place in late-twentieth-century Catholic mercy devotion. Mother Hope spent her last years at Collevalenza, directing her institutes and receiving pilgrims. She died there on 8 February 1983 and was buried in the sanctuary.

The diocesan inquiry into her life and virtues opened in the 1980s. On 23 April 2002 Pope John Paul II authorized the decree on her heroic virtues, after which she was styled Venerable. Following approval of a miracle attributed to her intercession, she was beatified on 31 May 2014 at Collevalenza. Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided as delegate of Pope Francis. She has not been canonized. Her liturgical memorial is kept on 8 February, the anniversary of her death. She remains identified with the Sanctuary of Merciful Love and with the two congregations she founded.