Bl. Maria Josefa Alhama y Valera

María Josefa Alhama Valera was born in 1893 at Santomera, near Murcia in Spain, the eldest of nine children of a poor farmworker. She was raised by the parish priest and his sisters and never went to school.

After time with other religious communities, she founded the Handmaids of Merciful Love in Madrid on Christmas night 1930, as Mother Speranza of Jesus. The sisters cared for poor children, orphans, the elderly and the sick. She moved to Rome in 1936, and in 1951 to Collevalenza in Umbria, where she founded the Sons of Merciful Love and built a shrine to Merciful Love.

She died at Collevalenza in 1983, aged eighty-nine, and was beatified there in 2014.

Maria Josefa Alhama y Valera was beatified in 2013.

Beatification allows public veneration, usually in a particular region or religious family. Canonization extends it to the whole Church.