Our Congregation was founded on May the 11th, 1885, in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Montiel, Benaguacil (Valencia – Spain), being approved by Pope Leo the thirteenth on March 25th 1902.
The name that Luis Amigó, our Founder, gave us defines our identity.
Sisters: That is how our Founder thought about us in our first Constitutions of 1885: “Differently from other Congregations in which there is distinction between the Choir Members or Mothers and the other, in this Congregation there will not be any distinctions among the sisters (CW 2294).
And the Final Documents of our XXII General Chapter (2016) continues putting into evidence that we are sisters called to live the prophecy of compassion and mercy.
Sisters contemplating and amazing before God’s presence;
Sisters loving, welcoming and embracing their fraternity in its humanizing and healing reality;
Minor sisters, seduced by littleness;
Merciful sisters, responding to the imperative of proximity;
Sisters in mission, with a fraternal, minor and merciful presence encouraging the audacity of compassion;
Intercultural sisters, witnessing the prophecy of fraternal communion.
Tertiary: We belong to the great Franciscan family and, with other Religious Congregations, profess the Rule of the Third Regular Order of Saint Francis.
Capuchin: Within the Franciscan Family, the Capuchin Order has its own characteristics and our Founder, Fr. Luis Amigó, as a Capuchin Friar, wanted for us to belong and be named after that name: “Each Order and each Congregation has its own characteristic spirit, according to the noble mission the Lord entrusts to them; and our Institution, as a branch of the Franciscan tree, and much more as Capuchin, must be characterized by a deep humility, a blind obedience and a total poverty (CW 1920).
Of the Holy Family:
Since the beginning, Fr. Luis thought to dedicate the Congregation to the “Holy Family”, a name that underlines the Franciscan spirit of fraternity as a family. Aside that the devotion of the Holy Family, was very alive at that time in the Church, perhaps the motivation came from a peculiar experience Fr. Luis lived when he was a young Capuchin Brother in Montehano (Cantabria, Spain). At the door of the convent they found an abandoned, rag wrapped, newborn child in a basket with a written note: “He is not baptized; he will be named, Jesus, Mary and Joseph”. The Community and civil authorities invited Fr. Luis to baptize the Child and, as they insisted, he accepted to do it. It was the first baptism he did and this fact and circumstances so deeply touched his heart that he wanted to add such a name, “of Holy Family” to the new Congregation. (cf. CW 51).
