Rome, 10/06/2018
As reported by the Press Office of the Vatican this Saturday, October 6, Pope Francis has appointed as Consultant of the Dicastery for the Laity the Family and Life to Maria Ascensión Romero Antón, member of the international team responsible for the Neocatechumenal Way.
María Ascensión Romero Antón joined the international team of the Neocatechumenal Way in January of 2018, after the death of the co-initiator of the Way, Carmen Hernández, and after the Dicastery for the Laity, the Family and the Life of the Holy See requested it, as established in the Statutes of the Way.
The initiator and responsible for team, Kiko Argüello, Fr. Mario Pezzi, and María Ascensión Romero, thank the Holy Father for this honor and once again manifest their closeness and communion.
Mª Ascensión Romero She was born on May 27, 1960 in Tudela, Navarra (Spain). She is the third of four brothers and studied at the school of the Compañía de María (the same in which Carmen Hernández studied.)
Later she moved to Soria to study teaching and there, at 19 years old, she got to know the Neocatechumenal Way. At the end of her time at the university, she returned to Tudela and joined the first neocatechumenal community in the parish of St. George.
In 1983 she passed the exams of teaching in Madrid and moved there to work as a teacher in several schools in the capital for nine years, joining a community of the Madrid parish of Santa Catalina de Siena. In 1987, she felt the call to evangelization, which was confirmed in August of 1989 at the end of the World Youth Day in Santiago de Compostela, with Saint John Paul II, in the vocational meeting that the Neocatechumenal Way celebrated in Zaragoza.
In 1992, she was sent as an itinerant to the former Soviet Union, where she has spent 25 years in places like Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia. In 2002, along with the rest of her community, she concluded the neocatechumenal itinerary and solemnly renewed her baptismal promises during the Easter Vigil in the Cathedral of La Almudena, presided by the then Archbishop of Madrid, the Cardinal Rouco Varela.