Blessed María Luisa Bermúdez Ruiz
Profile
The daughter of Elías Bermúdez Cotón and Maria del Carmen Ruiz García-Flores, both members of the Spanish nobility with large estates. Both María Luisa and her sister were educated in the Daughters of Charity school in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, both felt a call to religious life, both donated their inheritances to the Congregation of the Mission, and both became members of the Daughters of Charity. She served and trained in the San Blas asylum in Madrid, and formally joined the Daughters on 30 August 1917. She was assigned to teach in homes for neglected and abandoned children, serving at the Santa Eulalia Children’s Residence in Barcelona in 1918, the Cradle House of the Child Jesus in Logroño in 1920, the Casa Caridad in Zaragoza in 1921, the Asilo de Las Mercedes College in Madrid in 1922, and the San Eugenio Asilo College in Valencia in 1931. In all these, she was noted for a gift for working with small children.
At the outbreak of the persecutions in the Spanish Civil War, the Daughters were outlawed by the Communists. Sister Rosario hid in Puzol, Spain with her religious sisters, Blessed Rosario Ciércoles Gascón, Blessed Micaela Hernán Martínez, and a priest. They were captured on 17 August 1936, dragged before a show trial court, and executed for refusing to renounce her faith. Martyr.
Born
- 10 October 1893 in Subugueira, Coruña, Spain
- shot with a machinegun at dawn of 18 August 1936 in a lemon grove near the Benavites cemetery near Almenara, Valencia, Spain
- 27 June 2011 by Pope Benedict XVI (decree of martyrdom)
MLA Citation
- “Blessed María Luisa Bermúdez Ruiz“. CatholicSaints.Info. 12 August 2023. Web. 25 April 2024. <>