23rd August - Isabel Flores de Oliva, in the Rose de Lima religion. She was born in 1586 in Lima, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Coming from a poor family, she was the tenth child of parents born in metropolitan Spain.
Shortly after the age of four (1590), she knew how to read, without ever having learned it, and was nourished by the story of the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, canonised in 1461, who would become her model of spiritual life. She then decided to consecrate her life to God. At the age of twenty, in 1606, she took the habit of the Dominican tertiaries. However, as there was no convent in the town where she lived, she took refuge in a tiny hermitage at the far end of her parents' garden, where she spent the rest of her days in prayer and mortification.
She also benefited from mystical graces, so much so that the mistrust of the Inquisition led to several examinations by the religious authorities. Her profound answers astonished her detractors. At the same time, she devoted herself to the service of the Indians, abandoned children, the old, the infirm, and the sick.
Rose of Lima lived a life of penance and maceration which, without a deep mystical life, would have been unbearable. Following the example of Catherine of Siena, from her childhood she practised fasting, refusing meat and fruit. Later, she ate only bread and water. Through intense bodily penance, she offered herself to God as a bloody victim in union with Christ for the redemption of the souls in Purgatory and the conversion of all sinners. Not content with the wooden planks on which she slept, she made herself a bed with pieces of wood bound with cords and then filled the gaps with fragments of crockery and tiles with the sharpness upwards. She slept in this bed for the last sixteen years of her life. In her meditations and prayers she felt the pain of people of all origins and faiths and prayed for their conversion.
When she died in 1617 at the age of 31, the people of Lima rushed to her grave to collect some of the earth that covered her. She was canonized by Pope Clement X on April 12, 1671. Saint Rose of Lima is the patron saint of the Americas, the Philippines, Peru, the city of Lima, the national police force and the Catholic University of Peru.
