St. Maria Micaela Desmaisières

Who was St. Maria Micaela Desmaisières?

St. Maria Micaela Desmaisières was a Spanish noblewoman who walked into a Madrid charity hospital one day and never went back to the life she had known. She spent her fortune, her reputation and finally her life on women whom polite society would not name: girls and young women caught in prostitution, many of them sick. To serve them she founded the Adorers, Handmaids of the Blessed Sacrament and of Charity, whose sisters still pair long hours before the Eucharist with work among exploited women. Spain knows her as Madre Sacramento.

We keep her feast on August 24; her sisters celebrate her on June 15.

A girl of the court

María Micaela Desmaisières López de Dicastillo was born in Madrid in January 1809, in the middle of the war against Napoleon. The family fled to France during the war, and her father and her brother Luis died there. The Claretian Missionaries' account says she was educated by the Ursuline sisters of Pau.

Her life followed the round of a noblewoman of her rank. She held the title of Viscountess of Jorbalán. A marriage was arranged, and then called off the night before the wedding because of slanderous rumors about her family. The humiliation cut deep. She turned to a Jesuit, Fr. Carasa, for direction and began to care for the poor in Paris and Brussels. A plaque in the Paris church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule still records that during her long stay in that city she prayed there often and gave the parish its Stations of the Cross.

The hospital of St. John of God

The turning point came in Madrid, in her thirties. She visited the charity hospital of St. John of God and saw young women there suffering from venereal disease, many of them from the streets, with no one to receive them once they left. She resolved to give them a home.

Her friends, and even her family, were scandalized. A viscountess did not do such things. She did them anyway. In 1845 she opened a house in Madrid where such women could live, recover and be trained for honest work.

Mother Sacramento and the Adorers

The work grew, and it needed a community to carry it. In 1856, with the help of St. Anthony Mary Claret, then confessor to Queen Isabella II, she founded the Adorers, Handmaids of the Blessed Sacrament and of Charity, and took the name María Micaela of the Blessed Sacrament. Claret was her confessor from 1857. The Claretians write that he "helped her and the fledgling Institute both spiritually and materially" and had an important part in framing its constitutions and winning their approval. Both of them, they note, were badly slandered in the press.

She and seven companions made their first vows on January 6, 1859, and she made her perpetual profession on June 15, 1860. Her two loves fit together: hours of adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, and patient, motherly work with women who had been used and thrown away.

There is a lesson here for all of us. She did not treat prayer as a rest from the work, or the work as a distraction from prayer. The same Lord she adored in the monstrance she met in the women at her door, and she asked her sisters to see Him in both places. When we spend time before the Blessed Sacrament, we can ask her to send us out again with eyes like hers, able to recognize Christ in the person everyone else has decided to look past.

Death in the cholera of 1865

In the summer of 1865 cholera swept through Spain. Mother Sacramento was in Valencia, and she died there of the disease on August 24, 1865. By then her institute had seven houses.

She was laid in a burial niche in the General Cemetery of Valencia. A marble plaque still marks the spot, recording that her body rested there from August 1865 until March 7, 1891, when it was moved to her sisters' college in the Calle de Hernán Cortés.

Beatification and canonization

Pope Pius XI declared her heroic virtues in 1922, beatified her in 1925, and canonized her on March 4, 1934. We have not found an open source describing the miracles approved for her cause, so we do not describe them here.

Symbols of St. Maria Micaela in art

• Monstrance: the Blessed Sacrament exposed for adoration, the center of her life and her name in religion.
• Habit of the Adorers: the dark habit and veil of her congregation.

Statues and paintings of her in Spanish churches usually show a nineteenth-century religious sister in adoration, with the monstrance close by.

Feast day and prayer

We keep her feast on August 24, the day she died; the Adorers and many calendars in Spain and Latin America celebrate her on June 15. See the feast day calendar.

We found no traditional prayer to her with a text we could verify. Let us ask her help in our own words: St. Maria Micaela, Mother Sacramento, you knelt before Christ in the Eucharist and then went out to the women the world despised; pray for all who are trafficked and exploited, for those who work to free them, and teach us to see Christ in every person.