María Soledad Sanjurjo Santos

Nurse of the Caribbean Nights

María Consuelo Sanjurjo Santos was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1892 and educated by the Servants of Mary, Ministers of the Sick, at their Río Piedras orphanage school. At sixteen she entered the same congregation, whose charism is nursing the sick in their own homes, without charge, especially by night. She made her novitiate at the Madrid motherhouse, receiving the name María Soledad after the foundress, Saint María Soledad Torres Acosta, and professed perpetual vows in Santiago de Cuba in 1921.

For over four decades she served the Caribbean province: nursing and governing communities in Havana, Matanzas, Manzanillo, and San Juan, and from 1950 to 1962 leading the entire Antilles province. Her sisters knew her for an uncompromising dedication to the care of the sick and a drive to make Christ visible at bedsides across Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the wider Caribbean.

When revolutionary Cuba made religious life untenable, she orchestrated the 1962 transfer of the provincial house from Cuba to Puerto Rico, safeguarding the congregation’s Caribbean mission; she had already planted a novitiate in Ponce in 1954.

She spent her last years in the San Juan community and died there on Easter Monday, April 23, 1973, after 62 years of consecrated life. On January 15, 2019, Pope Francis recognized her heroic virtues, declaring her Venerable, one of the few Puerto Rican-born candidates to reach that stage.

Timeline