Francis Palau y Quer

Born near Lérida, Francis Palau entered the Discalced Carmelites, whose Barcelona friary burned in 1835; he was ordained priest the following year and served in the Catalan dioceses. He went into exile only in 1840, to Perpignan and then Montauban, and stayed eleven years, several of them as a hermit. Back home, he opened in Barcelona a catechism school so well attended that it alarmed the authorities: accused of stirring up the workers, it was closed in 1854 and he was banished six years to Ibiza, where he wrote his spiritual work. Freed in 1860, he founded the following year at Ciutadella in Menorca the Carmelites from whom the missionary institutes would come. Beatified in 1988, he is one of those whose exile produced the books.