Because she is in the process of consideration for the altars, Blessed Ascensión Nicol y Goñi — whose full name is Blessed Maria Ascensión of the Heart of Jesus Nicol y Goñi — is not well-known. But she does appear on the Dominican Order’s supplemental calendar of saints and blesseds, so here’s an introduction.

One reason St. John Paul II canonized so many saints was his desire to showcase more modern holiness. It’s one thing to honor “Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia…” and other saints of the early Church but sometimes we also ask how much they might have understood the problems of our world. (Probably more than we realize: possibilities may change, but the motivations for good and evil in the human heart remain pretty constant.)

Well, holiness is no less rare in our times. Blessed Ascensión (1868-1940) is an example.

She was born in northern Spain on March 14, 1868. Her first contact with the Dominican order was through a boarding school in which she was enrolled at age 14. That contact stimulated her vocation, though she returned home for a year before formally enrolling in the novitiate in 1885. She took vows the next year and began working as a teacher.

She continued that work for almost three decades, but national instability and governmental anticlericalism around the time of the First World War resulted in the nuns losing their school. Sister Ascensión wanted to work with the poor and so offered her services abroad. A Dominican bishop working in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, took her up on the offer. At age 45, she and a group of her sisters began a new apostolate, sailing for Peru. After acculturation time in Lima, they undertook a three-week journey across the Andes to Puerto Maldonado, a forest town in Peru’s southeast, near the Bolivian border.

There she and her sisters undertook the education of poor girls as well as providing whatever medical care they could for the locals. Their educational work did not discriminate: they taught town dwellers and girls from the local indigenous tribe. Her encounters with these poor led her to write: “I cannot explain what my soul is experiencing. … Never have I felt so close to God as I have in these 16 months in the mountains.”

Eventually, that closeness to God resulted in her founding, Oct. 5, 1918, a new religious congregation, the Dominican Missionary Sisters of the Rosary. She remained its superior until her death on Feb. 24, 1940. In those two decades, the congregation expanded, including Blessed Ascensión’s taking the nuns to China. The motherhouse was established in Pamplona, Spain, that country providing a conduit for missionary women to Latin America, following the line of Iberian contact with that part of the world.

Her process to sainthood began in 1962, and she was declared venerable in 2003. Her beatification, concurrently with Blessed Marianne Cope (who worked with lepers on Molokai in Hawaii) occurred in 2005. For more reading about Blessed Ascensión, see here and here.

Blessed Ascensión of the Heart of Jesus, pray for us!