St. Dulce Lopes Pontes

Who they were

Maria Rita Lopes Pontes, known everywhere as Sister Dulce, was a Bahian girl who took the habit at eighteen and never afterward walked past anyone lying in the street. Denied space and budget, she housed her first sick men in abandoned houses she occupied until she was evicted, and then in the one territory nobody contested: her convent's chicken yard, whose birds she is cheerfully recorded to have evicted herself.

The coop became an infirmary. The infirmary became, across five decades of relentless improvising and begging, with industrialists learning to sign before she had finished asking, the Obras Sociais Irmã Dulce, today among Brazil's largest charitable institutions, treating millions of poor patients a year. Tiny, asthmatic and unstoppable, she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, received John Paul II at her works, and died in 1992. Brazil, which had called her the Good Angel of Bahia for a generation, filled the streets. She was canonized in 2019, the first Brazilian born woman saint.

Why people turn to St. Dulce Lopes Pontes

Everyone starting something good with no budget and no permission. Brazilian families and the Portuguese speaking faithful. Nurses of the destitute, with St. Camillus de Lellis and St. Martin de Porres.

How to ask their intercession

Her method is the prayer: do the version of the good deed that fits in the space you already have, today. St. Alberto Hurtado had a truck and she had a chicken coop, and both of them just started.