Saint Rose, virgin, who, already as a young girl of exceptional austerity, took at Lima in Peru the habit of the Sisters of the regular Third Order of the Preachers. Devoted to penance and prayer and burning with zeal for the salvation of sinners and of the native peoples, for whom she desired to give her life, she willingly subjected herself to every affliction, that she might win them for Christ. Her death occurred on the day following this one.
Lifespan: 1586–1617
Beatified: 15 April 1668 by Pope Clement IX
Canonized: 12 April 1671 by Pope Clement X, Vatican Basilica
Memoria liturgica: 23 August
“My God, you may increase my sufferings, provided you increase my love for you.”
Isabel Flores de Oliva was born in Lima on 20 April 1586, the tenth of thirteen children of the Flores de Oliva family, Spanish nobles who had settled in Peru.
It was her wet-nurse Marianna, of Indian origin, who gave her the name Rose for the remarkable beauty that distinguished her — a name later confirmed at her confirmation and, at the age of twenty, when she took the habit of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, following her model of life, Saint Catherine of Siena. To Rose was then added the name “of Saint Mary,” to express the tender love that always bound her to the Virgin, to whom she turned at every moment to ask for protection.
Saint Rose came to know poverty when her family fell into destitution following the failure of her father’s business affairs. She worked hard as a domestic servant, in the garden, and as an embroiderer until late into the night, carrying into the homes of her customers the Word of Christ and her longing for goodness and justice — qualities that in the Peruvian society of the time, crushed beneath the weight of colonial Spain, seemed altogether obscured. In her mother’s house she created a kind of shelter for the needy, where she cared for abandoned children and the elderly, especially those of Indian origin.
Even as a young girl, Rose aspired to consecrate herself to God in the cloistered life, but she remained a “virgin in the world.” As a Dominican tertiary she enclosed herself in a small cell of a few square metres, built in the garden of her mother’s house, from which she emerged only for religious observances and where she spent the greater part of her days in prayer and in close union with the Lord.
One day, as she prayed before an image of the Virgin Mary holding the Child Jesus in her arms, she heard a voice from that child saying: “Rose, give me all your love….” She had no doubt: from that moment Jesus was her exclusive love until death — a love nurtured in virginity, prayer, and penance. She often repeated: “My God, you may increase my sufferings, provided you increase my love for you.”
The redemptive meaning of the Passion of Christ became clear to her: suffering borne in faith redeems and saves. The suffering of man can be united to the saving suffering of Christ. This was an interior turning point that coincided with her reading of Saint Catherine, from whom she learned love for the blood of Christ and love for the Church. And it was precisely in her garden hermitage that Saint Rose relived in her own flesh the Passion of Jesus, with two intentions: the conversion of the Spanish colonists and the evangelization of the indigenous peoples.
She is credited with mortifications and bodily penances of every kind, but also with many conversions and an equal number of miracles — among them, most notably, the failure of Dutch pirates to invade Lima in 1615.
While she was still alive, Rose was examined by a mixed commission of religious and scholars who judged her mystical experiences to be genuine “gifts of grace,” so that at her death the enormous crowd that attended her funeral already regarded Rose as a saint. She died only after renewing her religious vows, repeating again and again: “Jesus, be with me!”
It was the night of 23 August 1617. After her death, when her body was carried to the Chapel of the Rosary, the Madonna — from that very statue before which the Saint had so often prayed — smiled upon her once more, for the last time. The crowd present cried out that a miracle had occurred.
In 1668, Rose was beatified by Pope Clement IX and canonized three years later.
She is the first canonized saint of the New World and is patroness of Peru, of all Latin America, of the Indies, and of the Philippines.
She is invoked as protectress of florists and gardeners, against volcanic eruptions, and also in cases of wounds or for the resolution of family disputes.
A Jubilee Year commemorated the 400th anniversary of the death of Saint Rose with the motto: “400 years interceding for you” — a reference to the thousands of prayers that the Saint has received and answered over the course of four centuries.