Saint Rose of Lima

Virgin

Feast Day

August 23

Life

1586–1617

Canonized

1671

Order

Third Order of Saint Dominic (Dominican tertiary)

Born

Lima, Viceroyalty of Peru

Saint Rose of Lima was born Isabel Flores de Oliva at Lima, Peru, on April 20, 1586, of a Spanish criollo family of moderate means. The name Rose came from a domestic incident in her infancy and was confirmed by Saint Toribio Mogrovejo, Archbishop of Lima, at her Confirmation. She was the first person born in the Americas to be canonized.

From childhood Rose practiced extreme bodily austerities, in part inspired by the example of Saint Catherine of Siena. She refused suitors and at age twenty became a Dominican tertiary (1606), wearing the habit of the Third Order while living at home. She rejected even the proposal that she enter a cloister, choosing rather to remain at her parents' house in Lima, where in a small garden hut she lived a life of prayer, fasting (chains, hairshirt, three-day fasts), needlework and gardening to support her family, and care of poor and sick Indians, blacks, and slaves of the city.

The mystical writings she dictated to her confessor describe lengthy ecstasies, visions, and what she called the Fifteen Mansions of the Spiritual Life, paralleling Saint Teresa's Interior Castle. She suffered profound sustained interior trials of darkness and aridity. According to Lima tradition, when in 1615 Dutch Calvinist privateers under Admiral Jaques l'Hermite threatened the city, Rose led the women of Lima in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament at the Dominican church, ready to die in defense of the Eucharist; the attack did not come.

She died at the home of her benefactor, the Treasurer Don Gonzalo de la Maza, on August 24, 1617, at age thirty-one. Her funeral procession was the largest the colonial capital had seen, with the Archbishop, Viceroy, and the four mendicant orders all in attendance. Pope Clement IX beatified her in 1668; Pope Clement X canonized her on April 12, 1671, the first canonized saint born in the Americas. The same Clement X by the bull Sacrosancti apostolatus cura of August 11, 1670, declared her principal patroness of all the Americas, the Philippines, and the Indies.

Her birthplace shrine in Lima, the Santuario de Santa Rosa, draws large pilgrimages annually on August 23, the date of her Memorial in the General Roman Calendar (her actual day of death, August 24, being the Feast of Saint Bartholomew).