Two days before Mother Teresa’s canonisation, Sister Isabel Sola Matas was running an errand in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. She sat at the wheel of her old white SUV as traffic crawled towards a busy junction in the Bel Air region of the city. Suddenly, a group of men approached the car, shot the Catalan nun twice in the chest and made off with her purse.
Sister Isabel died instantly. But the 51-year-old left behind an indelible record of goodness. After entering the Congregation of Religious of Jesus and Mary, she had served in Equatorial Guinea. She moved to Haiti in 2008, working as a nurse, feeding the hungry, helping to build houses and founding a workshop making prosthetic limbs for amputees after the 2010 earthquake. “In killing her they didn’t kill just one person,” a local priest said, “they killed the hopes of many people.”
