The Jubilee begins for the 150th anniversary of the Company of the Cross

The Archbishop of Seville, Mons. José Ángel Saiz Meneses, inaugurates this Saturday the Jubilee decreed by the Apostolic Penitentiary for the 150th anniversary of the Company of the Cross, founded by Saint Ángela de la Cruz.

The institution, which seeks to “become poor with the poor to bring them to Christ,” concretizes its mission by visiting and accompanying the sick and needy in their homes, to whom they also prepare food, help with household chores or with cleaning routines.

They also provide care to sick people who live alone or whose families cannot take care of them, especially during the night hours, and offer help and food to needy people who come to the doors of the nuns’ homes.

The sisters of the Company of the Cross live exclusively from Providence. Their income comes almost entirely from “the alms they beg from door to door,” as described in the website Sisters of the Cross, created by a layman in tribute to the work of the institution.

Likewise, they dedicate part of their efforts to training, both in early childhood and primary education, as well as offering classes for adults in subjects such as computing, tailoring or embroidery, and they teach catechism to adults and young people.

The Sisters of the Cross have among their works residences for the elderly and orphanages.

To sustain all this activity, the Company of the Cross dedicates a good part of the day to contemplative prayer.

Saint Angela of the Cross was born in Seville in 1846, into a humble family with 14 children, who worked helping the Trinitarian friars with cooking and sewing. After receiving minimal instruction, he soon became an apprentice in a sewing workshop.

At the age of 15, for pious reasons, he slept on a board on the bed, fasted and “used the hair shirt (in the shape of a crown of thorns under his hair).”

One afternoon in the workshop “they found her kneeling in prayer, ecstatic, miraculously suspended above the ground,” an event she shared with her confessor, today Blessed José Torres Padilla, the next day.

At the age of 19 she wanted to enter a Carmelite convent as a lay sister, but it was not possible due to her fragile health. At 23, she was a postulant for the Daughters of Charity and took the habit of a novice, but her health once again got in the way.

Determined to continue her life of dedication to those most in need in the world, on November 1, 1871, she made the resolution to “live according to the evangelical counsels… imitate the hidden life of Jesus on the outside; and inwardly live crucified with Jesus.”

In 1875, once the ideas about a religious Institute that “would embrace voluntarily and out of love for God and the poor and the hardships of poverty” had been drafted, he made perpetual vows after consulting with Father Torres.

Thus, she left the shoe workshop where she worked and, together with two other colleagues, Juana María de Castro (the future Sister Sacramento) and Juana Magadán, started a community. Father Torres names her Big Sister, but Saint Angela decides to transfer that appointment to the Virgin Mary. At Christmas, the small community of four sisters begins to wear the habit.

In 1898, Pope Leo XIII approved the process for the approval of the Institute, which culminated in 1908 under the pontificate of Pius X, with the definitive approval of the constitutions.

Saint Angela of the Cross died in 1932. Saint John Paul II presided over the beatification ceremony in 1992, in Seville, and the canonization ceremony in 2003 in Madrid.