OMP Spain awards a nun with almost 50 years in Benin and an expert in missiology

The annual awards of the Pontifical Mission Societies (PMO) in Spain have gone in 2025 to the nun Julia Aguiar, a missionary in Benin for almost 50 years, and the priest, expert in missiology, Eloy Bueno de la Fuente.

For four years, PMS Spain has awarded the “Blessed Paulina Jaricot” award to missionaries who have distinguished themselves for their evangelizing dedication and the “Paolo Manna” award to people or institutions that have committed themselves to missionary awareness in Spain.

Julia Aguiar García was born in a small town in the province of Orense, in the northwest of the country, in 1950. Since she was little, she had a missionary vocation and, specifically, caring for the sick. After entering the congregation of the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Mother of the Divine Shepherdwas sent to Venezuela, where she worked as a teacher, until she returned to Spain to train in theology and medicine.

49 years ago, on October 12, Columbus Day, she arrived in Benin, a country located between Togo and Nigeria, in the Gulf of Guinea, with a group of three sisters, to take charge of a health center built by the Camilo Brothers, the only one in a remote area where the nearest hospital was 170 kilometers away.

A few years later, they founded their own health center in the town of Zagnanado and named it Gbémontin, which means “where life is found.”

Sister Aguiar is one of the most recognized experts on Buruli ulcer disease, a tropical bacterial infection similar to leprosy that she encountered shortly after arriving in Benin, where it was unknown. Only four decades earlier there had been an outbreak in Uganda and Rwanda.

Their first patient with this condition was a 10-year-old girl who had a strange wound on her arm and part of her back whose origin they managed to identify through analysis. Sister Julia documented all the subsequent cases one by one, until researchers from Belgium and Canada became interested in these files.

In 2009, Sister Julia Aguiar was awarded an Honoris Causa Doctorate in Medicine and Surgery by the University of Naples. Currently, he continues to direct the health center.

Everything at the service of the proclamation of the Gospel

The 2025 Paolo Manna Prize goes to Eloy Bueno de la Fuente, priest of the Archdiocese of Burgos, who is a student of what mission means in the Catholic Church.

Doctor in Missiology from the Urbaniana University of Rome and in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid, he is a professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Faculty of Theology of Northern Spain in Burgos.

In his academic career he has been director of the Institute of Missiology and Missionary Animation (1990-2010) and secretary of the Spanish Weeks of Missiology (1990-2010). He is also part of the scientific committees of several theological journals.

Among his numerous published works, there are volumes dedicated to Ecclesiology, or the “Anthropological Revolution”, of great intellectual height, which are combined with editions aimed at a broader audience such as the manual “Missionary animation today”.

According to OMP Spain, Eloy Bueno once condensed the true conception of the mission that arises from the message of Christ: “Everyone in the Church and everything in the Church must be at the service of announcing the entire Gospel to the whole world. Universality does not occur in the abstract but in the concreteness of history. Therefore, missionary action will not be able to relativize or relegate departure, sending, crossing shores and crossing borders.”

The winners received a sculpture that represents a crab carrying a cross, in allusion to the well-known anecdote of Saint Francis Xavier, patron saint of the missions, who threw his crucifix from a boat into the sea to calm a storm. The next day, on the beach, a crab pulled the crucifix out of the sea with its claws.

From OMP Spain they point out that “it is an image that represents the confidence and tenacity of the missionaries.”

“I am the fruit of missionaries”

Present at the awards ceremony was the general secretary of the Pontifical Missionary Union, Anh Nhue, a Vietnamese priest, who took the opportunity to thank the missionaries—many of them Spanish—who brought the faith to his country: “You can see in me the fruit of the missionaries,” he stated before wishing that “this Sunday’s Domund will be a jubilee moment for everyone.”

For his part, the Auxiliary Bishop of Madrid, Mons. Vicente Martín, dismissed the event by inviting everyone to bring hope to the world, emphasizing that “it is not that we ‘have’ a mission, but that ‘we are’ a mission.”