Feast day: August 23
St. Rose of Lima
Peruvian beauty who chose radical penance and service over marriage, supporting her family by gardening and needlework while caring for the city's sick.
Rose was born at Lima, Peru, in 1586, in the first generation of the Spanish New World, and was so beautiful as a child that she was given the name Rose. From her earliest years she wished to belong wholly to God; she resisted every suggestion of marriage, and to discourage the suitors drawn by her beauty she is said to have cut off her hair and rubbed pepper on her face to spoil her complexion.
Modeling her life on St. Catherine of Siena, she became a Dominican tertiary — a laywoman living under the rule in the world — and remained in her family home, where she took up a life of intense prayer and severe penance in a little hut she built in the garden. She wore a spiked crown hidden beneath her veil, in imitation of Christ's crown of thorns, and gave her nights to prayer.
Her penances were extreme, but her days were full of practical love. To help support her struggling family she grew flowers and did fine needlework and lace, and she turned a room of the house into a refuge where she cared for sick and destitute children, the elderly, and the indigenous and enslaved poor of the city — work that has led her to be called a pioneer of social service in the Americas.
She died at Lima in 1617, only thirty-one years old, mourned by the whole city. In 1671 she became the first person born in the Americas to be canonized a saint, and she is honored as the patroness of Peru, of Latin America, and of the Philippines, and of gardeners and florists.
She was the first canonized saint born in the Americas — the New World's first official saint was a laywoman who never left her hometown.
“Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”
— St. Rose of Lima
Image: Claudio Coello (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/13192c.htm
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