Rita Josefa Pujalte Sánchez

Rita Josefa Pujalte Sánchez was a Spanish Roman Catholic religious sister and martyr of the Spanish Civil War. She was born on 18 February 1853 in Aspe, in the province of Alicante in eastern Spain. Surviving sources say little about her family beyond a Catholic upbringing in nineteenth-century Spain. In adulthood she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Hermanas de la Caridad del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús), a religious institute devoted to the education of girls and to charitable work among the poor and the sick. The congregation maintained houses in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain, and she spent her religious life in teaching, formation of children, and the ordinary duties of convent life rather than in any public or founding role.

By 1936 she was an elderly member of her order’s Madrid community. She was not a widely known public figure; later ecclesiastical accounts emphasize fidelity to religious life, prayer, and perseverance in old age. Her companion in the same house was Sister Francisca Aldea Araujo, a younger member of the same congregation who served in a position of responsibility in the community.

The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936. In Madrid and other areas that remained under Republican control, a violent anticlerical campaign broke out almost at once: churches were burned, convents were sacked, and large numbers of bishops, priests, seminarians, and women religious were killed in the summer and autumn of that year. On 20 July 1936 armed militiamen seized Sister Rita Josefa Pujalte Sánchez and Sister Francisca Aldea Araujo from their community in Madrid. Both were murdered the same day. Rita Pujalte was eighty-three years old. Their deaths belong to the wider persecution of the Catholic Church in the Republican zone during the Civil War, later judged by the Church as martyrdom in hatred of the faith.

On 11 March 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified Rita Josefa Pujalte Sánchez and Francisca Aldea Araujo in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, together with 231 other Spanish martyrs of the twentieth century. She is venerated as Blessed Rita Josefa Pujalte Sánchez. Her liturgical commemoration is associated with 20 July, the date of her death. She has not been canonized. Devotion to her is found mainly within her religious congregation and among those who honor the Spanish Civil War martyrs; no widely documented special patronages are attached to her name.