Apolonia Lizárraga y Ochoa de Zabalegui was born on Holy Thursday, 18 April 1867, in the village of Lezáun, then part of the Valle de Yerri in Navarre, Spain, the daughter of Cándido Lizárraga and Martina Ochoa de Zabalegui. Because her family feared for her life, she was baptized almost at once, on 20 April, in the parish church of Saint Peter the Apostle, and she was confirmed on 30 May 1868 in the parish of San Millán. She was the second child of a large and deeply Christian household; several of her brothers and sisters also entered religion, two of her sisters joining the same Carmelite congregation, and an aunt, Gabriela Lizárraga, was abbess of the Conceptionists of Estella.
As a young woman Apolonia thought for a time of joining a Benedictine aunt in the cloister at Estella. But after a retreat made under the direction of Father Echeverría, she came to see that God was calling her to an active apostolate, and she told her father plainly: "I have realized that my vocation is apostolic; I would like to know the Carmelites of Charity at Vitoria." Once she had visited them her mind was made up, and she announced simply, "Father, I must go and join them."
On 16 July 1886, at the age of nineteen, she entered the novitiate of the Carmelite Sisters of Charity founded by Saint Joaquina de Vedruna, at Vitoria-Gasteiz, taking the name Sister Apolonia of the Blessed Sacrament; her sisters would often call her simply Sister Sacramento. She made her first vows in July 1888. Sent to Extremadura to prepare herself for teaching, she taught in the schools of Trujillo in Cáceres and Villafranca de los Barros in Badajoz, then became superior of the community at Seville and rector of the college at Vic in Catalonia, where the congregation had its mother house. She was in Vic in 1909 during the revolutionary disturbances in which churches were burned—an early lesson in the storm that would one day take her life.
Her inner life was thoroughly Carmelite and thoroughly Eucharistic: adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, love of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and confidence in Saint Joseph. Her motto expressed the whole of her soul: "Confidence against all confidence, and hope against all hope." Named to the general council of the congregation in 1911, from 1917 she was the trusted right hand of the mother general, who sent her to visit the communities of Extremadura and Andalusia and across the ocean to Chile and Argentina.
In 1925 she was elected superior general of the Carmelite Sisters of Charity, and she was re-elected in 1931. One of her first cares was to open the cause of beatification and canonization of the congregation's foundress, Joaquina de Vedruna, for which she travelled to Rome and was received in audience by Pope Pius XI. She opened a house of the institute in Rome in 1930, strengthened the congregation in the Americas, particularly in Buenos Aires, founded houses in France, and established schools in Spain at León, Vigo, Murcia, and Alcoy. She governed with a mother's heart, writing to her communities in 1935: "Have great confidence and consolation in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in the Blessed Virgin and in Saint Joseph, to whom I have entrusted the sisters, the schools, and all our goods. They will not abandon us. If we are faithful to them and love them more and more, they will give us their graces for all that we shall have to suffer."
She saw the darkness coming. Already in 1932 she had written, "Here we are preparing ourselves for unpleasant events, but nothing will happen before God permits it; we are his, and he will take care of us." In the spring of 1936 she wrote: "Everyone says that terrible things are expected and there is widespread panic; these are times of true persecution against God, and of course we nuns are the first to suffer the consequences—so blessed be God who allows this to happen. He will give us strength."
The outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936 found her at Vic. Her one thought was for her daughters: she searched out houses and families who would hide the sisters, especially the novices and the sick, emptying the mother house as far as she could before the militias arrived. On 20 July she removed the Blessed Sacrament from the church to the oratory and kept vigil in prayer through the night with the sisters who remained. The next day trucks of militiamen came from Barcelona, burning and pillaging churches, convents, images, and paintings. At four in the afternoon they knocked at the door and ordered all the religious out, allowing only the superior to remain; because one sister lay ill in bed, Mother Apolonia asked a militiaman to help carry her, and he did. She remained present through the whole minute search of the house, even offering the men refreshment, while they threatened to set the buildings on fire. Left alone, she was roused in the night with the announcement that the house would be burned, and she went out in secular dress to take refuge with neighbours, moving from hiding place to hiding place while continuing to shelter her sisters.
On 2 August, at the request of her sisters, she came to Barcelona and stayed with her cousin Margarita Ochoa de Zabalegui, then moved to the home of the Darner family together with two other Carmelites. In those weeks she met the Archbishop of Barcelona, Manuel Irurita, who was in hiding in the house of the Tort family; efforts were being made to obtain papers so that they might escape, and the Italian consulate offered to embark religious out of the city, but the authorities changed the rules and the plan came to nothing. Both Archbishop Irurita and members of the Tort family were afterwards killed. On the night of 6 September militiamen searched the Darner house, and Mother Apolonia acknowledged that she was a religious. No longer safe there, she returned to her cousins' home.
On 8 September 1936, the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, militiamen of the POUM arrested her together with Father José Puig, parish priest of Sants, who was also hidden there, and members of the household. They were taken for questioning and then led to the checa of Saint Elias—the former convent turned prison known as the "Tower of Death"—near the Passeig de Sant Joan and Carrer Provença, together with Nemesio Danver and another sister. Asked who she was, she confessed openly that she was a Carmelite Sister of Charity and refused to apostatize. According to the testimony gathered in the beatification process, including the account of two militiamen overheard by a witness, she was taken out into the central courtyard, stripped, bound at wrists and ankles, hung from a hook on the wall, and sawn apart alive, her remains being thrown to the pigs the jailers were fattening there. The witnesses declared that during her agony she prayed for her tormentors. The pigs were afterwards slaughtered and the sausage sold with the blasphemous name of "nun's chorizo."
The Church recognized her death as a true martyrdom "in hatred of the faith" on 22 June 2004, together with sixty-four companions of the Spanish persecution of 1936–1937. Blessed Apolonia of the Blessed Sacrament was beatified in Saint Peter's Square on 28 October 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI along with 498 Spanish martyrs; her feast is celebrated with her companions on 6 November. She had governed a great congregation, but her greatest work was done unarmed and alone: hiding her sisters, adoring the Sacrament she was named for, and forgiving those who butchered her.
May Blessed Apolonia of the Blessed Sacrament obtain for us her hope against all hope, and may we, like her, forgive today those who wound us and pray for them by name.
