Blessed Bonifacia Rodriguez de Castro was born in Salamanca, Spain, on June 6, 1837 in the bosom of a deeply Christian artisan family. In her adolescence, she learned the craft of cord-making, with which she started to earn a living at the age of fifteen, employed at first and later in her own shop of cord-making. Her life-witnessing attracted several young ladies who wanted to spend their afternoons with her on Sundays and holidays, thus converting her house-shop to developing center of protection of the working woman. Together they established the JOSEPHINE ASSOCIATION which became a seedbed of religious vocations. On January 10, 1874, together with a Jesuit priest: Francisco Hospital Butinya, she founded the Congregation of the SIERVAS DE SAN JOSE in Salamanca. This initiated a novel lifestyle of a feminine religious life inserted in the working world, following the footprints of the Holy Family of Nazareth.
The Siervas de San Jose, in their Taller de Nazaret, offered work to poor unemployed women so as to draw them far from the danger of losing their dignity as women who were starting to work outsides their homes in the beginning of the Spanish Industrial Revolution.
In the midst of this novelty and the many difficulties that this entailed, Bonifacia received all kinds of injustice, humiliation and calumny with admirable humility and meekness, without ever complaining, without demands nor protests. With great faith and trust in God, she allowed the silence of Jesus in His passion to seal her lips and forgive everyone with great generosity, without any preoccupation for her own justification. Venerated as saint in Zamora, she died in this city on August 9, 1905.
Pope John Paul II beatified her on November 9, 2003.
