At Tulcán in Ecuador, Blessed María of the Incarnation (María Vicenta) Rosal, virgin, who restored the Bethlehemite Sisters, especially to uphold the dignity of women and to give girls a Christian education.
Lifespan: 1820–1886
Beatified: 4 May 1997 by Pope John Paul II
Memoria liturgica: 24 August
First Blessed of Guatemala
María Vicenta Rosal was born on 26 October 1820 in Quezaltenango, Guatemala, and baptized with the name Vincenza Rosal. On the day of her First Communion she consecrated herself to God, drawn by the abiding presence of Christ in the Eucharist before the Tabernacle; her entire life bore a markedly Eucharistic character.
Though caught up, as young girls often are, in the diversions of youth, she was able at fifteen to respond without hesitation to her vocation to the religious life, which she cultivated assiduously until, at eighteen, she entered the Bethlehemite Sisters in Guatemala City. The institute had been founded in 1668 by Brother Rodrigo de la Cruz, successor and continuator of the work of Brother Pedro de Betancur — now venerated as a saint throughout Guatemala — and for two centuries had been under the jurisdiction of the Bethlehemite Fathers.
On entering the beaterio she perceived that the fervent spirit which had animated the institute at its founding had grown faint. Though the outward signs of religious enclosure were present — the turn, the grille, and the veil — the life was no longer one of true recollection, nor were the pupils in the sisters’ charge properly separated from the professed religious. She contrasted this with the Convent of Santa Catalina — an island of peace and recollection she had visited before entering the beaterio — and felt a deep attraction to the life there, wavering over whether to remain at Bethlehem. She took up the study of the Order’s history and the founding principles of Brother Pedro; guided by her confessor, she entered the novitiate, and on 16 July 1838 received the habit, changing her name from Vincenza to María of the Incarnation.
On 26 January 1840 she made her solemn vows of chastity, poverty, enclosure, and hospitality to the poor. In the two years that followed she was assailed by spiritual crisis, torn between fervour and spiritual languor, feeling herself physically weakened and unequal to the demands of the Rule. In her distress, and with the agreement of the prioress and her confessor, in July 1842 she transferred to the Convent of Santa Catalina. Once again she experienced the contrast in spirit and fervour between the two houses; yet even as she enjoyed the peace she had recovered, she longed for those same positive and life-giving qualities to take root in Bethlehem as well. With the resolve of a strong and convinced woman she returned to the beaterio, where she was received with joy by her sisters.
In 1849 she was elected Vicaress and entrusted with the direction of the novitiate — a most delicate responsibility in the formation of new sisters. The esteem she had earned led to her election as superior in 1855.
Her wise governance of the community, together with the counsel of her Dominican and Jesuit confessors, showed her the need to draw up proper Constitutions, since the community had until then been governed by rules belonging to the Bethlehemite Fathers. With the bishop’s permission she set about composing them, despite the resistance of the older sisters; gradually these Constitutions were put into practice — first at Quezaltenango, cradle of the Reform, and then at Cartago.
She grew daily more ardent in her love for the humanity of Christ, contemplating those moments of the Passion that most deeply struck and moved her. The prayer in Gethsemane was the central point of her contemplation of the Inner Sorrows of her beloved Lord. She fostered in the Church a special devotion and veneration directed to the Inner Sorrows of His Heart.
In the social sphere she courageously withstood the demands of radical governments that — first in Guatemala and then in Costa Rica — were bent on persecuting the Church she loved and served as a faithful daughter. She was expelled from both countries and made her way to Colombia with her sisters, where, after a journey across seas and lands — through hardship, misunderstanding, and long waiting — she found the stability she sensed would be lasting, in a land of blessing and of promise for the future.
For her sisters she was “the mother of every day” — the one who rose before dawn, who governed without commanding and counselled without wearying; she prayed much and wrote things described as “tender, simple, beautiful.” At the urging of the Bishop of Ibarra, she chose and prepared a group of sisters to go to Ecuador to found a new beaterio.
On 10 August 1886 they set out, and Mother María of the Incarnation decided to accompany them, wishing to see for herself the place and conditions in which they would work. During the journey she suffered an accident that caused her great pain; yet she pressed on, reaching the Sanctuary of Las Lajas, dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, where she begged the grace of dying in an act of love for God.
With great difficulty she was carried to Tulcán in Ecuador, where at five o’clock in the morning on 24 August 1886 her soul left this earth to be reunited with God. Years later her body, found incorrupt, was translated to Pasto in Colombia, where it rests to this day. In 1920 the first canonical process for her beatification was opened.
Following a miracle worked through her intercession in 1975 in Colombia — in a gravely ill patient treated at a hospital where the Bethlehemite Sisters served — Pope John Paul II proclaimed her Blessed on 4 May 1997 in Saint Peter’s Square, Rome.
Her life was closely linked to that of Saint Pedro de Betancur, the Saint Francis of Guatemala. Curiously, the periods of their lives are widely separated — the seventeenth century for Brother Pedro, founder of the Bethlehemites, and the nineteenth century for Mother Rosal, the reformer — or more precisely, the re-foundress — of the Bethlehemite Sisters. For the Congregation she was, across a span of two centuries, what so many co-foundresses were in their own day for the founders of religious institutes alongside whom they laboured.