Rosa de Lima (1586–1617)

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Rosa de Lima (1586–1617)

Santa Rosa de Lima was baptized Isabel Flores de Oliva in Lima. Hagiography holds that her indigenous nursemaid declared her as beautiful as a rose and that she was called Rosa thereafter. Archbishop Toribio de Mogrovejo confirmed her as "Rosa" in 1597 in rural Quives, where her noble but impecunious family lived briefly; her presence did not, as hagiographers claim, ameliorate the local indigenous people's hostility toward him. Some accounts of Rosa's childhood describe it as humble, some as abusive. An admirer of Catherine of Siena, she responded to compliments by cutting her hair and disfiguring her skin. She refused to marry, though she at first declined to join a convent because of poverty and her mother's opposition. She withdrew to a shack in her family's garden, engaging in prayer and often painful penitential acts that scholars interpret as, if not masochistic, one of the few means she had to control her own life.

Rosa became a Dominican tertiary at twenty and continued her prayer and charitable work. She also supplemented the family income by taking in needlework (some of which, along with writings and drawings, is preserved). Although religious authorities prosecuted other beatas of colonial Lima, Rosa escaped criticism. Later biographies recount her friendship with Dominican tertiary Martin de Porres (little evidence of it exists), and her charity extending to poor women, the indigenous, and Afro-Peruvians. Reported miracles of her lifetime include healings, mystical visions (interpreted by some as erotic, by others as challenging institutional hierarchy), and the sudden deliverance of Lima-Callao from a Dutch attack in 1615 after she prayed for such an outcome at the Church of Nuestra Señora del Rosario.

At her funeral in 1617, onlookers clamored for relics and called for her canonization. Posthumous testimonies describe the preservation of her corpse, the use of her relics to cure the sick, and appearances to petitioners. Her beatification was proposed in 1630 and completed in 1664, when she was named patroness of Lima and Peru. Church leaders recognized the necessity of local devotions for securing the loyalty of New World Christians, thus hastening the process of her beatification, as did Creole ambitions to prove American worth. Her following first surged in Mexico, antedating approval of devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Peruvians' enthusiasm grew over time, with eighteenth-century indigenous rebels adopting her as their standard, as did both royalists and patriots during the independence wars. With canonization in 1671, she became First Patron of the Americas, the Philippines, and the Indies. Although this may have "domesticated" extra-hierarchical female claims to religious revelation, it made sainthood a possibility for the New World.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Glave, Luis Miguel. De Rosa y espinas: Economía, sociedad y mentalidades andinas, siglo XVII. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1998.

Graziano, Frank. Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Hampe Martínez, Teodoro. Santidad e identidad criolla: Estudio del proceso de canonización de Santa Rosa. Cuzco, Peru: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 1998.

Hansen, Leonardus. Vida admirable de Sta Rosa de Lima Patrona del Nuevo Mundo [1664–1668], trans. Jacinto Parra, OP (reformada por el Zuavo Pontificio Sevilla, Caballero de Pío IX), 2nd edition. Vergara: Edit. "El Santísimo Rosario," 1929.

Millones, Luis. Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Dn. Gonzalo de la Maza a quien ella llamaba padre. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993.

Múgica Pinilla, Ramón. Rosa limensis: Mística, política e iconografía en torno a la patrona de América. Lima: IFEA, 2001.

Kristina A. Boylan

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture