Blessed María Berenice Duque

María Berenice Hencker (14 August 1898 – 25 July 1993), born as Ana Julia Duque Hencker, was a Colombian religious sister and the founder of the Little Sisters of the Annunciation. Hencker first entered the Dominican nuns in Bogotá in 1917 where she made her solemn vows after the completion of her novitiate. It was after this that she spent the next three decades teaching children in various locations until she saw the plight of the poor and the minorities around her; she decided to establish a religious congregation that would cater to their needs and secured support from the Archbishop of Bogotá to achieve this. Hencker was a prolific writer and was known to write articles and books in service to her fellow sisters that would touch upon the aims of the congregation she founded and on various themes that she wanted it to address. Through her congregation she was able to establish schools and nurseries with a particular emphasis on girls and women who were often left sidelined in Colombian life and left to fend for themselves. Hencker focused on the disadvantaged regions in Colombia and exhorted her sisters to tend to the marginalized and those on the peripheries such as prostitutes and drug addicts. She also founded several branches of the congregation that would cater to people living in the world and to priests who shared her desire to evangelize among the poor and tend to those on the societal peripheries. The beatification process launched in Medellín in 1998 and Hencker was titled a Servant of God. Hencker was beatified in Medellín on 29 October 2022. Ana Julia Duque Hencker was born on 14 August 1898 in Salamina in the Caldas Department as the eldest of nineteen children born to Antonio José Duque Botero and Ana Berenice Hencker Rister (of German origins). Five of her siblings entered into the religious life with one brother becoming a priest and three sisters all becoming religious; Elías became a priest while María, Lucila, and Tulia all became nuns.