María Berenice Duque

María Berenice Hencker (14 August 1898 – 25 July 1993), born as Ana Julia Duque Hencker, was a Colombian religious sister and the founder of the Little Sisters of the Annunciation. Hencker first entered the Dominican nuns in Bogotá in 1917 where she made her solemn vows after the completion of her novitiate. It was after this that she spent the next three decades teaching children in various locations until she saw the plight of the poor and the minorities around her;

Hencker was a prolific writer and was known to write articles and books in service to her fellow sisters that would touch upon the aims of the congregation she founded and on various themes that she wanted it to address. Through her congregation she was able to establish schools and nurseries with a particular emphasis on girls and women who were often left sidelined in Colombian life and left to fend for themselves. Hencker focused on the disadvantaged regions in Colombia and exhorted her sisters to tend to the marginalized and those on the peripheries such as prostitutes and drug addicts. She also founded several branches of the congregation that would cater to people living in the world and to priests who shared her desire to evangelize among the poor and tend to those on the societal peripheries. The C.C.S. provided a decree of validation on 26 August 2005 that determined that all the correct evidence had been submitted to them and that the diocesan process had been conducted according to their regulations. The postulation (the officials managing the cause) submitted the "Positio" dossier to the C.C.S. in 2009 for additional evaluation.

Nine theologians approved the Positio on 19 December 2018 and the cardinal and bishop members of the C.C.S. also provided their approval to the cause on 15 January 2019. On 12 February 2019 Pope Francis signed a decree that determined that Hencker could be titled venerable on the account of her life of heroic virtue. Francis later signed a decree that approved a miracle attributed to her intercession on 13 October 2021 (medical consultants advising the C.C.S. approved it in March 2021 as did nine theologians in June 2021) which therefore enabled for Hencker to be beatified. The miracle was the healing of a thirteen year old girl in April 2004. The beatification was celebrated in Medellín on 29 October 2022.

The postulator for this cause is Alix Mercedes Duarte Roa, HA.