María Asunción Milá

María Asunción Milá Sagnier was born in Barcelona on 20 July 1919, the third of nine children of José María Milá Camps (1886 to 1955) and Montserrat Sagnier Costa (1891 to 1966). Her father was a lawyer, financier and politician who presided over the Provincial Council of Barcelona from 1925 to 1930 and was created the first Count of Montseny by King Alfonso XIII in 1926. Her siblings included José Luis, who became the second Count of Montseny and father of the journalists Mercedes and Lorenzo Milá; the industrial designers Leopoldo and Miguel Milá; the architect Alfonso Milá; María del Carmen, who became a religious sister; Montserrat; Luis María; and Rafael.

She was a teenager during the Spanish Civil War. Her father was imprisoned on the prison ship Uruguay before escaping to the Nationalist zone. She later said that, having lived through a war, she and her husband were especially sensitive to the defence of life. From childhood, she said, she felt she should have many children like her mother, "give life and defend life".

Details of her formal schooling have not been made public. She often said she was "never more than a mother of a family". Her formation as an activist came through reading and study: she followed theology classes in Seville, studied Church councils and documents, and said she preferred having theologians explain the Bible to her. Her husband, a Catholic propagandist from a young age, invited her into meetings that had been closed to women, which she said influenced her greatly. She spoke French but not English.

The execution by garrote of Salvador Puig Antich on 2 March 1974 turned her into an activist. With Ramón Carande (1887 to 1986), her husband and others she founded the Spanish Association against the Death Penalty, which was publicly constituted in 1976 with Carande as president and Milá as secretary. The state never legalised it.

In 1975 she, Carande and the priest and journalist José María Javierre visited Cardinal Bueno Monreal in Seville to ask him to mediate with Franco over the last executions of the regime, without success. During the drafting of the 1978 Constitution she and her husband lobbied ministries, intellectuals and the military, and she pressed minister Landelino Lavilla to abolish the death penalty in the constitution itself rather than by statute. Article 15 abolished it, except for military law in wartime, an exception she criticised: "If it is bad in times of peace, it is bad in times of war."

After attending Amnesty International's 1977 Stockholm conference, she and her husband joined Amnesty and worked with it for many years. Family sources told EFE that she was its president in Spain in the 1980s; ABC called her a former vice president, and Canal Sur's archive says she held various senior posts. She left when Amnesty began campaigning for abortion law reform.

Her longest effort was a letter campaign to successive popes asking that the Catechism of the Catholic Church stop legitimising capital punishment. After Luis Arroyo delivered her letter to Pope Francis in 2015, the Pope replied by hand. In August 2018 the Catechism was revised to declare the death penalty inadmissible, and the Vatican telephoned her with the news.

On 2 July 1939 she married Manuel de Salinas Benjumea (1908 to 2006), a Sevillian painter she had met at the April Fair, and moved to Seville. They lived in the Casa Salinas, a sixteenth-century palace on Calle Mateos Gago near the Giralda, where their twelve sons were born between 1940 and 1965. Their eldest, Manuel Salinas, became a celebrated painter and died in 2021 of Covid-19; her sons José María and Diego also died before her. The youngest, Cristián, shows visitors the open part of the house. Her granddaughter Alejandra de Salinas is married to the politician José María Michavila. She spent summers at the family home in Esplugues de Llobregat near Barcelona, where she celebrated her 100th and 104th birthdays. She signed her writing with her husband's surname, as French women do, so that no one could think she was hiding behind an unfamiliar name. At her death she had 22 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren.

Her opposition to capital punishment was rooted in her Catholic faith. She argued that "a State that kills is a State that teaches how to kill" and that "violence is not fought with more violence". She defended life "before or after birth" and said she never understood people who opposed the death penalty but supported abortion, or the reverse. She came to accept permanent prison sentences as long as they were reviewable. She argued that women should be able to be ordained priests, and she said that if she had been a man people would have paid her more attention. She praised the reconciliation of the Spanish Transition and King Juan Carlos I, and she strongly opposed Catalan separatism, calling nationalism "a disease that destroys peoples". She admired the active nonviolence of Jean Goss and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, whom she met with her husband.

She is credited by Spanish media as one of the people who pushed the Catholic Church to revise Article 2267 of its Catechism in 2018, so that it now calls the death penalty "inadmissible" and commits the Church to its abolition worldwide. She is also remembered as one of the earliest Spanish voices for abolition, and as part of the campaign that wrote abolition into Article 15 of the 1978 Constitution. She herself resisted being called the person who convinced the Pope: "Let us not make the news smaller by centring it on me. What matters is the historic step the Church has taken."

In October 2016 she was honoured at the Faculty of Law of the University of Seville in an event organised by the Seville Bar Association, the university's Institute of Criminology and the faculty, attended by Archbishop Juan José Asenjo, who called her an "excellent Christian". In 2017 she received the encomienda of the Order of Alfonso X the Wise. In 2019 the parishioners of Santa Cruz in Seville paid tribute to her on her 100th birthday. She was number one on the roll of the Hermandad de Santa Cruz.

She gave interviews to Canal Sur (1991, on the 30th anniversary of Amnesty International), El Confidencial and ABC (2018, after the Catechism change) and El Mundo (2023, at 104), among others. She recommended the film Dead Man Walking and Sister Helen Prejean's book on which it was based. Her niece Mercedes Milá has said her aunt influenced her decision to study journalism.

María Asunción Milá de Salinas died in her sleep on the morning of Tuesday 13 October 2026 at her home in Seville, aged 107, according to family sources quoted by EFE. No specific cause was made public. Her funeral Mass was held on Wednesday 14 October 2026 at the church of Santa Cruz on Calle Mateos Gago. Her resting place has not been made public. The Hermandad de Santa Cruz, ABC de Sevilla, Diario de Sevilla, El Mundo, El Debate and Informativos Telecinco were among those who marked her death.