Vicenta María López i Vicuña
Foundress of Daughters of Mary Immaculate for Domestic Service (1847-1890)
Vicenta María López y Vicuña (22 March 1847 - 26 December 1890) was a Spanish professed religious and the founder of the Religious of Mary Immaculate. Her order was dedicated to administering to "working girls", or young women in domestic employment, and she took the view that these housemaids and other domestic servants needed care, with a particular emphasis on girls who suffered abuse.
Pope Pius XII presided over her beatification in 1950 and Pope Paul VI later proclaimed her to be a saint in 1975.
Life
Vicenta María López y Vicuña was born on 22 March 1847 in Cascante to José Maria Lopez Jiménez and Nicolasa Vicuña. Her brother was Manuel María Vicuña. His maternal aunt and his priest great-uncle oversaw her religious education.
In 1866 she refused to entertain the notion of an arranged marriage and she instead decided to take a private vow to remain chaste while also realizing she had an inner calling to the religious life. For a time she lived with her maternal aunt Eulalia de Vicuña who had founded a home for domestic servants and with her aunt helped to form a group of women in order to administer to working girls.
The rule for that group was soon composed and on 11 June 1876 founded her own religious order to that end. In 1878 professed her vows alongside three others as a nun.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q457672. VIAF identifies the subject as 50471588. The Library of Congress control number is n50064583. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1847, 1890, 1950 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vicenta María López i Vicuña” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.