The Rose of Peru

Today we remember St. Rose of Lima, the first canonized Saint of the Western hemisphere. She was born in Peru in 1586 and died there at the age of thirty-one. Like many who have felt a call to the Dominican Order over the centuries, Rose initially faced opposition from her family. They refused to let her enter a convent. Rose’s response was to become a Lay Dominican and to live a life of solitude and penance within the confines of her family’s home. She had a great attraction to St. Catherine of Siena, a great love for the Blessed Sacrament, and limitless compassion for the elderly, homeless and the sick, whom she would eventually care for in one of the rooms in her parents’ residence. “When we serve the poor and the sick,” she tells us, “we serve Jesus. We must not fail to help our neighbors, because in them we serve Jesus.”

Rose enthusiastically embraced a life of penance and physical suffering since she also understood that “Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”

While most of us today are not willing to voluntarily subject ourselves to the penitential sufferings which Rose sought and welcomed in her short life, all of us will suffer in some fashion during our earthly life. Rather than run away from such challenges, we too should embrace them and transform them into acts of reparation for our own failings and those of others.

I suspect our Peruvian Saint was given a glimpse of the extent to which twenty-first century Catholics would avoid the gift of sacrificial suffering when she wrote the following:

St. Rose of Lima on Grace from Tribulation

Today our Dominican family celebrates the memorial of St. Rose of Lima (1586-1617). She was the first canonized saint of the Western hemisphere, a contemporary of St. Martin DePorres and Saint John Macias, and “patron saint of Lima, Peru, all the Americas, the Phillippines, India, florists, gardeners, and people ridiculed for their piety”.

 

The Office of Readings today offers this excerpt from her writings for our fruitful meditation and response:

 
Our Lord and Savior lifted up his voice and said with incomparable majesty: “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. Let men take care not to stray and be deceived. This is the only true stairway to paradise, and without the cross they can find no road to climb to heaven.”

When I heard these words, a strong force came upon me and seemed to place me in the middle of a street, so that I might say in a loud voice to people of every age, sex and status: “Hear, O people; hear, O nations. I am warning you about the commandment of Christ by using words that came from his own lips: We cannot obtain grace unless we suffer afflictions. We must heap trouble upon trouble to attain a deep participation in the divine nature, the glory of the sons of God and perfect happiness of soul.”

That same force strongly urged me to proclaim the beauty of divine grace. It pressed me so that my breath came slow and forced me to sweat and pant. I felt as if my soul could no longer be kept in the prison of the body, but that it had burst its chains and was free and alone and was going very swiftly through the whole world saying:

“If only mortals would learn how great it is to possess divine grace, how beautiful, how noble, how precious. How many riches it hides within itself, how many joys and delights! Without doubt they would devote all their care and concern to winning for themselves pains and afflictions. All men throughout the world would seek trouble, infirmities and torments, instead of good fortune, in order to attain the unfathomable treasure of grace. This is the reward and the final gain of patience. No one would complain about his cross or about troubles that may happen to him, if he would come to know the scales on which they are weighed when they are distributed to men.”

                      (Source of image: St. Rose of Lima Parish, Safford, AZ)