Sta. Bonifacia Rodriguez Castro, SSJ
Bonifacia Rodríguez Castro is a simple worker who, in the midst of everyday life, opens herself to the gift of God, allowing it to grow in her heart with attitudes authentically evangelical. Faithful to the call of God, she abandons herself to the Father's arms, allowing him to imprint on her the features of Jesus, the worker of Nazareth, who lives hidden the great part of his life in the company of his parents.
She is born in Salamanca, Spain, on June 6, 1837, in the bosom of an artisan family. Her parents, Juan and Maria Natalia, were deeply Christian, having foremost in their mind the education in faith of their six children among whom Bonifacia was the eldest. Her first school is the home of her parents, where Juan, a tailor, had installed his sewing shop, which is for Bonifacia the first thing she sees upon birth.
Having completed her primary studies, she learns the trade of cord-making, with which she starts earning a living by working for others at the age of fifteen, upon the death of her father, in order to help her mother support the family. The need to work in order to live, shapes early on her solid personality, experiencing in her own body the hard conditions of the woman worker of the age: exhausting work schedule and meager pay.
After having overcome the first financial difficulties, Bonifacia puts up her own cord-shop, passementerie and other needlework, wherein she works with the greatest recollection possible and imitates the hidden life of the Family of Nazareth. She had great devotion to Mary Immaculate and St. Joseph, the two current devotions, after the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the declaration of St. Joseph as the patron of the universal Church in 1870.
From 1865, the wedding date of Agustina, the only one among her siblings who reached adulthood, Bonifacia and her mother, who had been left alone, dedicated themselves to a life of intense piety, going everyday to the nearby Clerecía, the church ran by the Society of Jesus.
A group of girls from Salamanca, her friends, attracted by the witness of her life, begin to meet in her house-shop in the afternoon of Sundays and feast days in order to avoid dangerous forms of entertainment of the time. They found in Bonifacia a friend who would help them. Together they decide to form the Association of the Immaculate and St. Joseph, later called Josephine Association. Thus, the shop of Bonifacia acquires a clear apostolic and social dimension of preventing the woman worker from being led astray.
Bonifacia feels called to religious life. Her great devotion to Mary continues to nurture in her heart the dream of becoming a Dominican in the convent of Sta. Maria de Dueñas in Salamanca.
But a momentous event will change the course of her life: the encounter with a Catalan Jesuit Francisco Javier Butiña y Hospital, native of Bañolas-Gerona (1834-1899), who arrives in Salamanca in October of 1870 with a great apostolic concern toward the world of manual workers. He was writing for them “The Light of the Manual Worker”, a collection of life stories of distinguished faithful who sanctified themselves in humble occupations. Attracted by his evangelizing message about the sanctification of work, Bonifacia puts herself under his spiritual direction. Through her, Butiña gets in contact with the young women who frequented her shop, majority of whom are also manual workers. And the Holy Spirit moves him to found a new congregation oriented towards the protection of the woman worker out of this group of women workers.
Bonifacia confides to him her decision to become a Dominican, but Butiña proposes to her to found with him the Congregation of the Siervas de San Jose, to which Bonifacia agreed with docility. Together with other six women from the Josephine Association, among them her mother, she initiates community life in Salamanca, in her own shop, on January 10, 1874, a very conflictive moment in the political life of the country.
Three days before, on January 7, the bishop of Salamanca, Don Joaquin Lluch y Garriga, had signed the Decree of Erection of the Institute. A Catalan like Butiña and a native of Manresa‑Barcelona (1816-1882), he had supported with great enthusiasm the new foundation from the first moment.