María Josefa Segovia Morón (10 October 1891 - 29 March 1957) was a

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and the co-founder of the Teresian Institute that she established alongside Father Pedro Castroverde. Morón devoted her life to the functioning of the institute in

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and served as its first director until her death. Morón was proclaimed as

Venerable The Venerable (''venerabilis'' in Latin) is a style, a title, or an epithet which is used in some Western Christian churches, or it is a translation of similar terms for clerics in Eastern Orthodoxy and monastics in Buddhism. Christianity Cathol ...

on 19 December 2005 after

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beatified her.

Life

María Josefa Segovia Morón was born in

on 10 October 1891 to Manuel Segovia Rubio and María de los Dolores Morón; her sister was Isabel Segovia Morón (she had eight children) following her marriage. In 1913 she graduated from the La Escuela Superior del Magisterio in

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and returned to her hometown after this. It was there that she met Saint Pedro Poveda Castroverde who - upon learning about her - invited her to serve as the director of an institute that he wished to open; she was 22 and did not consider this to be an impediment despite what she perceived as potential inexperience. She accepted and the two went on to establish the Teresian Institute. She also began to pinpoint the areas the institute would focus on; Poveda said to her in 1922 in public: "You embody the spirit of the Teresian Institute". Morón abandoned plans to live the conventional life to instead devote herself to the maintenance and the direction of the numerous academies of the institute that were opening across Spain. She presented this in

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in a private audience on 11 January 1924 and received the pontiff's canonical approval after having received initial ecclesiastical approval back in 1917. She served as the institute's first director. In 1936 she learned that her friend Poveda had been killed during the

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- which had started the month Poveda was killed - and she wrote of it to the institute not long after. She then had to grapple with directing the institute alone. She helped to prepare the canonization cause of Poveda and was one of the main witnesses called. Morón died on 29 March 1957 following an operation. Following her death the

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Casimiro Morcillo González said that her holiness would soon be recognized - this prompted calls for a process of canonization.

Beatification process

The beatification process commenced under

Pope Paul VI Pope Paul VI ( la, Paulus VI; it, Paolo VI; born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, ; 26 September 18976 August 1978) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City, Vatican City State from 21 June 1963 to his ...

on 10 October 1966 after being accorded with the title of

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and the commencement of an informative process that concluded its work on 16 July 1973. Her spiritual writings received the approval of 26 November 1976 as being orthodox and not in contradiction of the faith while on 27 January 1995 the

Congregation for the Causes of Saints In the Catholic Church, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, previously named the Congregation for the Causes of Saints (), is the dicastery of the Roman Curia that oversees the complex process that leads to the canonization of saints, pa ...

validated the informative process. The C.C.S. assumed possession of the

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and tasked theologians to evaluate it before the C.C.S. themselves voted on its contents. On 19 December 2005 she was proclaimed to be

after

acknowledged her life of

heroic virtue Heroic virtue is a phrase coined by Augustine of Hippo to describe the virtue of early Christian martyrs and used by the Catholic Church. The Greek pagan term hero described a person with possibly superhuman abilities and great goodness, and "it ...

. The miracle needed for her to be beatified was investigated in Spain and was validated in Rome on 8 November 1999 while a medical board met and approved the miracle a decade later on 15 January 2009. The current

postulator A postulator is the person who guides a cause for beatification or canonization through the judicial processes required by the Roman Catholic Church. The qualifications, role and function of the postulator are spelled out in the ''Norms to be Obse ...

that is assigned to the cause is Dr. Encarnación González Rodríguez.

References

External links

Hagiography CircleSaints SQPNTeresian Institute
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moron, Maria Josefa Segovia 1891 births 1957 deaths 20th-century venerated Christians 20th-century Spanish people Founders of Catholic religious communities People from Jaén, Spain Spanish Roman Catholics Venerated Catholics by Pope Benedict XVI