The Servants of St. Joseph (Spanish: Siervas de San José, who use the postnominal initials SSJ) form an international congregation of religious sisters in the Roman Catholic Church.

Bonifacia Rodríguez was born in Salamanca on June 6, 1837, in a small home on Las Mazas Street near the ancient University.

After five years as an independent artisan, in 1870, Bonifacia met a newly arrived priest from Catalunya, Francesc Butinyà, S.J.

Butinyà was from a family of factory owners, but he had a vision of responding to the needs of the growing working class which had arisen from the Industrial Revolution, one which was far ahead of the Church leaders of the day.

Bonifacia opened her workshop as a meeting place for gatherings of working women like herself, both for socializing and for times of reflection on the themes and issues of the day.

Gradually, Rodríguez felt herself called to religious life in a convent, and finally decided to enter a local one.

Butinyà, however, saw in her the model he envisioned of someone who could imitate the quiet life of service and prayer which Christ Himself had followed in his home in Nazareth, with Mary, His mother, and Joseph.

Butinyà wrote a short Rule of Life for the small community, in which he envisioned them demonstrating, through their lives, that there was a fraternity in labor; they would create spaces where workers could become free and critical observers of their society.

Bonifacia Rodríguez developed a deep trust in this vision and maintained a strong sense of her life as an imitation of that of St. Joseph, who worked quietly building a home in Nazareth.

This trust was needed, as the community faced the loss of Butinyà and his support when, the following April, he was expelled from Spain along with all the other members of the Society of Jesus.

Though he soon wrote them from his place of exile in France, Rodríguez faced the burden alone of sustaining the community and their goal of protecting the youth of the city.

A new Bishop of Salamanca was installed, Narciso Martínez y Izquierdo, who immediately looked to invigorate the structures and organizations of the Church.

Three years later, the Congregation moved from the working-class neighborhood where Bonificia had lived her entire life to a large, old house which was in total disrepair.

Deciding that there was no good way to deal with this situation, Rodríguez petitioned the bishop to establish a new house of the Congregation in the city of Zamora.

Back in Salamanca, García Repila was leading the Congregation there away from the commitment to manual labor which Butinyà and Rodríguez had seen as fundamental to their way of life, both spiritually and in identifying with their neighbors.

This advanced to the point where, in August 1884, Bishop Martínez modified the Constitutions written in 1882 by Butinyà to remove this as an element of their daily lives.

In this new house, they were able to expand to the point where this industrial work was able to sustain not only the Servants, but the young girls they had begun to take in and teach a trade.

Apart from Spain, the Servants of St. Joseph currently (2010) also have communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru,[1] Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Italy, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Vietnam.

James McCloskey, the Bishop of Jaro, Iloilo, the SSJ Sisters came to the Philippines in May 1932 and established themselves in San Jose, Antique.