Josefa María Ruano García was born on 9 July 1854 in Berja, in the province of Almería, into a working family whose faith was its chief inheritance. Her parents, Antonio Ruano and María Raimunda García, taught her early that God is served in the poor. From the sunburnt hills of Andalusia she carried away a plain, laborious piety that would never leave her, and a heart drawn to those whom no one wants.
In 1877 she left home for Valencia and entered the Congregation of the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly, the young Valencian family founded to gather up the aged poor who had no one at all. She received the habit in 1880, taking the name Josefa of Saint John of God — the name of the great servant of the sick — and in the same year made her temporary profession. In 1895 she bound herself to God for ever by perpetual vows. Her whole religious life was spent in the humblest and most wearying kind of charity: begging alms for the houses, cooking, washing, dressing wounds, sitting with the dying, and giving to men and women whom the world had discarded the tenderness of a daughter.
Her sisters recognized in her a steadiness fit for governing, and she was made superior at Cascante, at Requena and at Alcira. The last years of her long life were spent as superior, in a second term, of the house at Requena, where she was serving in the asylum for the elderly when the persecution of 1936 fell upon the Church in Spain. She was then eighty-two years old, still at her post among the old people entrusted to her.
On 29 July 1936 the community received the order to abandon the asylum. The house was dissolved, the sisters scattered, and Mother Josefa, together with two of her religious, Dolores and Gregoria, was arrested. That same day they were allowed to return to the asylum, and they remained near the poor whom they had served, aware that the reprieve might be brief. It was. On 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the militiamen came again and took the three sisters away, saying they would be carried to the prison at Alcira.
The cart never reached Alcira. At Buñol, in the province of Valencia, the women were made to climb down and were shot on the roadside and left for dead. Mother Josefa and Sister Dolores died at once, their long lives of service sealed in blood on Our Lady's birthday. Sister Gregoria, gravely wounded, survived: the mayor of Buñol saved her and ordered that her wounds be treated, and she lived on for many years.
It was Gregoria who bore witness, together with the mayor of Buñol, to what had happened on that road; their testimony proved decisive when the cause of Josefa and Dolores was introduced. On 11 March 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified them in Rome in the great company of Blessed José Aparicio Sanz and two hundred thirty-two companions, martyrs of Valencia. The Roman Martyrology commemorates Blessed Josefa of Saint John of God on 8 September, the day of her death, while she is also honoured on 6 November with the Spanish martyrs of the twentieth century. Her relics are venerated in the chapel of the Asylum of the Abandoned Elderly at Requena, in the very house where she gave her last years of service — a martyr's tomb set in the middle of the works of mercy that made her a martyr.
Her life preaches a simple lesson: fidelity in small, unglamorous charity prepares the soul for great sacrifice. She had spent decades lifting the helpless; at eighty-two she was helpless herself, and she gave that too to God without complaint.
May Blessed Josefa of Saint John of God obtain for us her patient tenderness toward the aged and forgotten, and may we today serve one neglected person with the love she would have shown.
