Saint Rose of Lima (1586-1617)

Birth and Baptism (1586)

Isabel Flores de Oliva was born on 20 April 1586 in Lima, capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and was baptized on 25 May 1586 in the parish of Saint Sebastian.^[1] She was one of eleven children^[2] of a modest household. Her father, Gaspar Flores, was an arquebusier in the service of the Spanish Crown, a native of Baños de Montemayor (province of Cáceres, Spain); her mother, María de Oliva y Herrera, was a criolla — a daughter of Spaniards born in Peru.^[3][4]

The family knew hardship: Gaspar struggled to support a large household, and the young Isabel contributed very early to the family budget through sewing, embroidery and growing flowers.^[5] It was in this poor and pious milieu of the young colonial society that a vocation of uncommon intensity would grow.

The Name "Rose"

Tradition holds that the nickname Rosa came to her in early childhood: a servant is said to have seen the baby's face turn into a rose.^[6] The name stuck, against the wishes of her grandmother, who insisted on her baptismal first name. The matter was settled at her confirmation, in 1597, at Quives, by the Archbishop of Lima Toribio de Mogrovejo — himself a future saint — who officially enrolled her under the name of Rose.^[7][8] She henceforth adopted the religious name of Rose of Saint Mary (Rosa de Santa María) and entered the Dominican Third Order as a beata around 1606.^[9]

"May this name of Rose, given by men, become the name that God confirms." — Tradition sees in this episode the first sign of a life entirely placed under the sign of the flower: beauty, fragrance, but also thorns.

An Early Vocation

Very early on, Rose felt called to give herself to God alone. Able to read from the age of four, she devoured the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, the great Dominican tertiary of the 14th century, who became her model for her whole life.^[10] Following her example, from childhood she began to fast three times a week and to impose hidden penances on herself.^[11] The choice of Catherine was no accident: like her, Rose would be neither an enclosed nun nor a foundress, but a consecrated laywoman living in the world, uniting contemplation, penance and service of the poor.

The Vow of Virginity and the Refusal of Marriage

Having become a young girl remarked for her beauty, Rose came up against her parents' plan to marry her off — all the more so as the family hoped for an advantageous marriage to escape hardship. For some ten years, Rose resisted suitors as well as family pressure, before making, around her twentieth year, a vow of perpetual virginity.^[12][13]

This refusal was not contempt for marriage, but a radical preference for the Divine Spouse. Rose's entire nuptial spirituality — which would culminate in the mystical marriage of 1617 — was already contained in this decision, held despite everyone's opposition.

Disfiguring a Beauty Too Praised

To discourage compliments on her face and hands, Rose went so far as gestures that modern sensibilities judge extreme: when her beauty was praised, she cut off her hair, rubbed her face with pepper to inflame her skin, and damaged her hands.^[14] These acts, which revolt or intrigue, express a coherent spiritual logic: Rose held her beauty to be a trap liable to turn her away from God and to stir covetousness; she sacrificed it as one cuts away an obstacle.

The Hermitage at the Bottom of the Garden

Around 1615, Rose had a tiny cell of about two square metres built for her at the bottom of the family garden, with the help of her brother Hernando, where she withdrew to pray, fast and keep vigil.^[15][16] There she led the life of a voluntary recluse, hardly going out except to church — often to the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo and to the church of the Rosary. This garden hermitage, where nature, flowers and solitude came together, has become one of the most enduring symbols of her figure.

The Dominican Third Order

In her twentieth year, Rose took the habit of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, those lay people attached to the Dominican family who commit themselves to a life of prayer and penance without entering the cloister.^[17] She thus followed the same path as Catherine of Siena two centuries earlier. Her devotion was rooted in the Eucharist: extraordinarily rare for her time, she received Communion daily, and observed a perpetual abstinence from meat.^[18]

The Silver Crown and the Mortifications

Rose's penances passed into posterity. Under her veil she wore a heavy silver crown set with spikes turned inwards, in memory of Christ's crown of thorns.^[19][20] The best-known detail of her iconography lies here: this crown of spikes, she concealed under a garland of roses, so that no one would guess her penance.^[21] She allowed herself no more than two hours of sleep a night, so as to devote more hours to prayer; she slept on the bare ground^[22], used the hair shirt, and wore, tradition says, an iron belt whose key she is said to have thrown into a well so as never to be able to remove it — for, according to the old Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), fourteen years.^[23][24] She multiplied fasts and vigils.^[25]

These austerities, which lasted some ten years, were not in her a pursuit of suffering for its own sake, but conformity to the suffering Christ and a struggle against everything in herself that could resist God. In canonizing her, the Church did not set up her excesses as a model to be imitated to the letter: it discerned, beneath the rigour of the means, the heroic love that animated them.

"Grace Comes After Tribulation"

The meaning of all this penance, Rose herself formulated in words gathered by her confidant, the physician Juan del Castillo, and taken up ever since in the Office of Readings of her feast. In them she reports an interior word of the Lord:

"Let all men know that grace comes after tribulation. Let them know that without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace. Let them know that the gifts of grace increase as the struggles increase." — Saint Rose of Lima, writings reported to Dr Juan del Castillo, read at the Office of 23 August^[26]

This is the key to her life: the cross is not a goal, but the only ladder to Heaven. Two sayings, which have become famous, sum up her doctrine:

"Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to Heaven." — Saint Rose of Lima^[27]

"Lord, increase my sufferings, and with them increase Your love in my heart." — Saint Rose of Lima^[28]

An Infirmary in the Family Home

Rose's penance was never selfish withdrawal. In a room of her parents' house, she took in sick poor, abandoned children, old people and Indians without help, nursing and feeding them with her own hands.^[29][30][31] This domestic "infirmary", open to the most despised of colonial society, is regarded by Peruvian historians as a foreshadowing of the country's first works of social assistance.

Alongside Martin de Porres

Rose was not alone in embodying this charity in Lima. She was the contemporary of Martin de Porres, the mulatto Dominican lay brother, tireless servant of the poor and sick of the city, with whom tradition shows her collaborating in the care of the disinherited.^[32] Lima was then home to a simultaneous flowering of holiness, which has been called the "saints of Lima":

This table does not aim at exhaustiveness, but shows the exceptional spiritual density of Lima at the turn of the 16th-17th centuries, where a single generation produced a reforming archbishop, two Dominican brothers of charity, and the first saint of the continent.

Lace, Embroidery and Flowers

To support her impoverished family and help the poor, Rose sold at the market her fine embroidery, her lace and the flowers she grew in the garden; she also embroidered clothes and liturgical vestments.^[33][34] Manual work, far from contradicting her mystical life, was part of it: following the example of Catherine of Siena and the whole Dominican tradition, she united contemplation and labour, prayer and concrete service of neighbour.

Spiritual Directors and Discernment

Rose's mystical states — ecstasies, visions, interior words — were not left to self-teaching. She was followed by Dominican and Jesuit confessors, and entrusted the most secret detail of her relationship with God to Doctor Juan del Castillo, a physician of Spanish origin versed in spirituality, who examined the nature of her interior phenomena.^[35] From the outset, then, the Church subjected Rose's experience to a prudent discernment, the condition of any later recognition of her holiness.

The Interior Trials

Rose's path was not one of continuous ecstasies. She went through long periods of aridity, temptations and apparent abandonment by God — what the mystical tradition calls the "night" of the soul. Far from diminishing her figure, these trials bring her closer to the common experience of the great mystics, from Teresa of Avila to John of the Cross: holiness does not remove the combat, it goes through it.

"If men knew what grace is, they would shrink from no trial to obtain it." — Saint Rose of Lima, in line with her writings on grace and tribulation^[36]

The Mystical Marriage (26 March 1617)

The summit of Rose's spiritual life was, according to tradition, a mystical marriage with Christ. On Palm Sunday 1617 (19 March), in Santo Domingo church in Lima, before an image of Our Lady of the Rosary, she heard the call of the Child Jesus to become His spouse^[37]; then, on Easter Sunday 26 March 1617, during an early-morning Mass, the Dominican Fray Alonso Velázquez placed on her finger the ring fashioned by her brother, as a sign of perpetual covenant — the ring having been kept in the tabernacle until that day, according to the testimony of Doña María de Uzátegui at the canonization trial^[38][39]. Tradition places on the lips of the Child Jesus these words:

"Rose of my heart, I want you for My spouse." — Words reported by the tradition of Rose's mystical marriage, before the Virgin of the Rosary^[40]

"Las Mercedes": the Mystical Ladder

Of Rose, almost no developed writing remains: she left neither treatise, nor journal, nor abundant correspondence. But, out of obedience to her directors, she recorded the favours received from Heaven in notes and drawings that have remained famous under the name of Las Mercedes (The Favours), sometimes called her Mystical Ladder (Escala espiritual).^[41] These plates diagram the degrees of spiritual ascent, from first conversion to transforming union — a rare testimony of a New World mystic describing herself, in images, the soul's journey towards God.

The Pirates of 1615

Among the traditions attached to Rose, one concerns the defence of Lima against the corsairs. In 1615, the fleet of the Dutchman Joris van Spilbergen threatened the port of Callao, which served the capital. Tradition holds that Rose, fearing a sacking of the churches, stood in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, ready to defend it; yet the enemy commander died suddenly and the fleet withdrew without attacking.^[42] The people of Lima attributed their deliverance to Rose's intercession — which explains her iconography in which she carries the city, sometimes supported by an anchor.^[43]

The historian will prudently note that Spilbergen's withdrawal has documented causes (the expedition continued on its way through the Pacific), but the popular conviction testifies, already in Rose's lifetime, to the spiritual radiance attributed to her in her city.

Death (24 August 1617)

Exhausted by penances and struck by a long illness that the sources liken to tuberculosis, Rose died on 24 August 1617, at the age of thirty-one, in the house of her benefactor Gonzalo de la Maza, the treasurer who had taken her in during her last illness.^[44][45] She is said to have predicted the day of her death. The old Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) for its part places her death on 30 August 1617 — a frequent divergence of dates in old sources, tradition and the majority of modern sources retaining 24 August.^[46]

A People's Funeral

Rose's death at once revealed the extent of her reputation for holiness. Her funeral gathered a considerable crowd; the chronicles report that the throng filled the equivalent of several city blocks and that the procession had to be delayed before the crush of the people.^[47] The press was such that a riot was nearly touched upon: the faithful, eager for relics, crowded around the coffin to tear off a piece of her habit.^[48] Notables, religious and poor of Lima all wanted to touch her body or carry away a relic: the popular devotion that would bear her cause to the altars half a century later was already born. The trial with a view to her glorification opened as early as 1618.^[49]

Beatification and Canonization (1667-1671)

The beatification trial was conducted with remarkable speed for the time. Rose was beatified by Pope Clement IX in 1667 (on 15 April according to several sources; some retain 1668 for the promulgation), then canonized by Pope Clement X on 12 April 1671.^[50] Fewer than fifty-four years separate her death from her canonization — an exceptionally short interval that speaks to the strength of her reputation.

First Saint of the Americas

The scope of this event goes beyond Lima alone. Rose is the first person born in the New World to be enrolled in the catalogue of saints.^[51][52] Her canonization, barely a century and a half after the arrival of the first missionaries, sealed the spiritual maturity of Catholic America: the evangelized soil now bore its own saints. See the overall picture in the dossier Catholic Missions in America.

Patronages and Feast

Clement X proclaimed Rose principal patroness of Peru, then of the whole of Spanish America and of the Philippines.^[53][54] She is also invoked as patroness of the indigenous peoples of America, of gardeners, florists and embroiderers — these last two patronages referring directly to her flower name.^[55] Her liturgical feast is celebrated on 23 August in the universal Church — 24 August, the day of her death, being already taken by the feast of the apostle Saint Bartholomew — and on 30 August in Peru, where Saint Rose is a national figure.^[56]

Saint Rose of Lima founded no order, wrote no great treatise, governed nothing. Her greatness lies in having lived, in a poor house of a colonial city, a union with God of rare intensity, while keeping her hands open to the poor of her city.

She reminds today's reader of two things. First, that holiness does not wait for the cloister: Rose was a laywoman, in the world, at the heart of a family. Second, that penance is never an end: her austerities, sometimes disconcerting, made sense only when turned towards love of the crucified Christ and towards service of neighbour. The Church does not propose imitating her bodily rigour to the letter, but imitating the love that inspired it.

"Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to Heaven." — Rose's whole life is contained in this saying: the cross borne out of love becomes the very path of glory.

Four centuries after her death, the first flower of holiness of the New World still draws pilgrims to Santo Domingo in Lima, and her name remains, for millions of Catholics in Latin America and the Philippines, the face of a holiness at once mystical and close.

• Catholic Missions in America — the great narrative of the evangelization of the New World, of which Rose is the first canonized fruit.
• Saint Turibio de Mogrovejo (1538-1606) — the Archbishop of Lima who confirmed her under the name of Rose.
• Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639) — the Dominican brother of charity, Rose's contemporary in the same Lima.
• Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) — to place Rose's mystical experience within the great tradition of Carmel and of prayer.
• Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591) — the doctrine of the "night" of the soul, which Rose went through in her own way.