The Church possesses an astounding treasure in the innumerable varieties of its apostles, doctors, spiritual teachers, its types of holiness in men or in women, not only in the past, but in our epoch and in all times.

After the apostles and saints of the East, after a St. Augustine, a St. Catherine of Sienna, a St. John of the Cross and a St. Teresa of Avila, we are presented with a Don Bosco and a Pere de Foucauld.  Closer to our times, alongside the virginal figures of a Therese of Lisieux and of a Maria Goretti, at this moment it unveils to us an exquisite Mexican young girl, pure and lovely to look at, mother of nine children and grandmother of numerous offspring.  She spent her life on earth with simplicity, surrounded by her family and friends, involved in the daily routine of her social milieu, a woman like other women, but in the depths of her soul shone an extraordinary apostolic flame, a heroic zeal to imitate Christ and to be identified with the Crucified to save men with Him.  It reveals to us one who loves the Church passionately, offering herself as a victim to it, an incomparable model of a wife, a glory for the laity of whose mission in the Church and of whose call to the highest sanctity she reminds us.  She never lived in cloister yet nonetheless inspired the founding of two religious congregations: one of women, the Contemplatives of the Cross, the other of men, the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit.  It was she who left behind her a message for the renewal of the world through the Cross.

For too long holiness has been considered a monopoly of religious life and of the priesthood.  Numerous conciliar Fathers of Vatican II reacted against this discretionary concept.  It is the whole Church, every member of the Mystical Body of Christ, who should be holy.  The People of God is a holy nation, a people of priests and of kings (Ex 19:6). The Sermon on the Mount is a charter of perfection for everyone, without exception.  The Church of today needs saints everywhere, not only in the cloister and at the foot of the altar, but in the family, in places of work, in every sector of human activity.  Holiness is a call of God who addresses Himself to all men.

The laity in particular is called today to witness before the whole world to an outstanding holiness.  Does not God give us an example of this in this mother of nine children on her way to the altars?

Conchita lived on earth, simple and joyous among her own, wholly given over to God in the secret recesses of her soul in which dwelt the Holy Spirit, living in an intense apostolic splendor radiating from the horizons of the Church, creatrix of a new style of holiness accessible to all.

What strikes us most about Conchita is the many facets of her life.  She fulfilled all the vocations of a woman: fiancée, wife, mother, widow, grandmother and even, by a special indulgence of Pius X, without ever being deprived of her family status, died canonically as a religious in the arms of her children.

She addresses herself to all categories of the People of God, to lay and to married people, to priests and to bishops, to religious and to all consecrated lives.

She treats not only of the relations of the soul with God but also deals with all the great themes of Christianity: God, Christ, the Mother of God, the mystery of the Church, the eternal meaning of all human life.  Her Spiritual Diary with its sixty-six manuscript volumes equals in amplitude the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, ascending effortlessly and often without transition from the most lowly household occupations to the Generation of the Word in the splendors of the Trinity.  By the profundity of the sublimeness of her writings, Conchita rivals St. Catherine of Siena or a Teresa of Avila.  One of the Commissions charged with examining her in 1913 in Rome declared: "She is extraordinary of the extraordinary!"

Mexico, March 3, 1972 on the 35th anniversary of the death of Conchita.