Joaquina de Vedruna i Vidal was born to a great Catalan magistracy family at Barcelona and at sixteen, in 1799, married Teodoro de Mas, a young Barcelona merchant. The marriage produced nine children. Her husband — a captain of the Spanish royalist guerrilla resistance to the Napoleonic occupation of Catalonia between 1808 and 1814 — survived the war and died in 1816 of war-related illness, leaving Joaquina a widow at thirty-three with eight surviving children (the oldest fifteen, the youngest a few months old).
She spent the next decade raising her children at the family country house at Vic, in central Catalonia. By 1826 her youngest had reached primary-school age. Encouraged by her Capuchin spiritual director Father Esteban de Olot, she founded in 1826 the Carmelite Sisters of Charity — a new Catalan religious congregation dedicated to the catechetical education of poor girls and to the care of the sick poor at home and in hospital. The first eight sisters professed vows on January 6, 1826 — five of whom were Joaquina's own daughters.
She spent the rest of her life as superior general of the rapidly-growing congregation across Catalonia, through the convulsive years of the Carlist Wars (during which she was briefly arrested by anti-clerical forces and lost two of her own sons). The Carmelites of Charity (Carmelitas de la Caridad) became one of the principal Spanish Catholic women's congregations of the 19th century. She died of cholera at Vic on August 28, 1854. Canonized by John XXIII in 1959.