Saint Rose of Lima

Virgin, First Saint of the Americas
(1586–1617)

Saint Rose of Lima, born Isabel Flores de Oliva on April 20, 1586, in Lima, Peru, was the first person born in the Americas to be canonised by the Catholic Church and is the patron saint of Latin America, the Philippines, and the Indies. She was the tenth of thirteen children of a Spanish settler family of modest means. Her beauty was so striking in infancy that a servant is said to have exclaimed that her face was like a rose, and from that moment she was called Rose, though she was formally baptised Isabel.

From her earliest years she showed an extraordinary intensity of devotion, taking Saint Catherine of Siena as her model and seeking to imitate her both in her penance and in her mystical union with God. To disfigure her face and resist the vanity that her beauty might occasion, she rubbed pepper on her cheeks and cut off her hair when her mother adorned it with flowers. She wore a metal spiked crown on her head beneath a wreath of roses in imitation of the Crown of Thorns, a form of mortification she practised for years.

She became a Dominican tertiary and lived as a recluse in a small hermitage in her parents' garden, supporting her family by selling the embroidery she worked by lamplight and the flowers she cultivated. Her mystical life was extraordinarily rich and also extraordinarily painful: she experienced prolonged periods of spiritual desolation and what the mystics call the dark night of the soul, during which she felt utterly abandoned by God, and she endured these trials with heroic patience.

She died on August 24, 1617, at the age of thirty-one, worn out by her austerities. At her death the entire city of Lima turned out for her funeral, and miracles were reported immediately. She was beatified in 1668 and canonised by Clement X in 1671. Her feast is celebrated on August 23rd in the current calendar.