María Teresalina Sánchez

Through years of religious formation and work on her nursing skills, she was preparing herself for mission work. For this she prayed that she might be like a sponge from which one could squeeze "even the last drop". After her profession of perpetual vows in the congregation, she was sent to the overseas missions with 44 other Spanish Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, fulfilling a dream that she had cherished for a long time. The group left for Kashmir on 16 April 1947.

The Sisters arrived at the mission of Baramulla about 9 August 1947. Their base of operations was a convent attached to a hospital. Sánchez began her health ministry serving the poor of the community. She provided healthcare to the local people and visited the homebound in the community. During this time she began to study English, Urdu, and Kashmir. She thrived in this situation, and was quickly appointed as the Assistant Superior.

While there, Sánchez came to know the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, a missionary religious congregation founded in India. After having read the biography of a member of the congregation, Sister Maria Assunta Pallotta, who had died in China at age 27 while nursing the sick during an outbreak of typhus, she decided to enter the congregation. Due to the illness and death of her father and other circumstances, however, she did not enter until 1940, after the family returned to Spain, where she was admitted as a candidate at the convent in Pamplona. At her admission to the novitiate of the congregation, she was given the religious name of Maria Teresalina.

María Teresalina Sánchez, F.M.M. (13 July 1918 – 27 October 1947) was a Spanish Franciscan Religious Sister who served as a missionary to Kashmir. She was murdered on the grounds of St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Baramulla by invading tribesmen during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947. She is considered the first Christian martyr in Jammu and Kashmir.

She was born Joaquina de Z. Sánchez on July 13, 1918, in the village of Sondika, Biscay, called Bidegain, into a large family of seventeen children. While still an infant, her parents entrusted her upbringing to a community of the Daughters of the Cross in Bilbao. At eleven years of age she became a boarder in the teaching college in Orduña run by the Sisters of the Company of Mary, Our Lady, where she volunteered until the end of her studies at the Missionary Center of Bilbao. In 1936, at the age of 18, she thought of becoming a Carmelite nun, but doing so was impossible due to the Spanish Civil War then raging in Spain. She then began to work as a nurse in the municipal hospital of Bilbao, but in May 1937 she went into exile with her family as a result of the fight, settling in Cambo-les-Bains in southern France.