Ascensión Nicol y Goñi

María Ascensión Nicol y Goñi, OP, (14 March 1868 – 24 February 1940) was a Spanish religious sister of the Third Order of St. Dominic. She co-founded the Congregation of Dominican Missionary Sisters of the Rosary, which she helped to found in Peru, and was the congregation's first prioress.

Life

Background Florentina Nicol y Goñi was born on 14 March 1868 in Tafalla, Navarre, the youngest of the four daughters of Juan Nicol y Zalduendo, a shopkeeper specializing in farming items, and of Águeda Goñi y Vidal, who died in 1872. As a child, she had many duties, including helping her family with the household chores. In 1878 a cousin of her father, who was a Discalced Carmelite, offered to educate the middle two daughters at the boarding school of her convent, the oldest having already married. Agreeing, he sent the girls to study. They later entered the Carmelite convent themselves.

In December 1881 Nicol was enrolled by her father at the boarding school of the Beaterio (Convent) of Santa Rosa in Huesca, a religious community of contemplative sisters of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, which was considered a prestigious school in the region. It was there that she was able to experience for herself the consecrated life, which raised questions in her mind about her future. Her father and stepmother withdrew her from the school in February 1883, considering that she had received sufficient education for a female. During that time, however, she had felt called to join the Dominican Sisters who had taught her, but she returned home to reflect on her choices.

Deprived of their traditional ministry, the sisters decided to act on a proposal they had long considered, namely, missionary service, about which they had learned from the periodicals issued by various missionary congregations. They wrote to ecclesiastical authorities in both America and the Philippines, seeking a field where they could help the poorest of the poor. The response came from the friar Ramón Zubieta, a former missionary in the Philippines who had just been appointed by the Holy See as the Apostolic Vicar of a new vicariate in the Peruvian amazons. The friar had traveled to Rome for his consecration as a bishop. After his stay in Rome, he stopped in Huesca to speak with the sisters to see if he would be able to get some of the community to help in his new responsibility. Five of the sisters who volunteered for this mission were chosen, and Nicol was chosen to lead them. Among its members, the congregation counts four Sisters who are considered to be martyrs for the faith, having been tortured and murdered in the former Republic of the Congo on 25 November 1964, in the course of the Simba Rebellion, after they refused to leave the patients in their hospital.

Veneration The beatification process of Nicol was opened in Pamplona in September 1962. Pope John Paul II declared her venerabkle in 2003. The following year a miracle was declared to have taken place through her intercession, due to which Pope Benedict XVI authorized the process to proceed. Thus, on 15 May 2005, in St. Peter's Square, Nicol was beatified in a ceremony presided over by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins. Nicol was beatified along with another missionary religious sister, Marianne Cope, who worked among the lepers of Molokai, Hawaii.