St. Mariam Baouardy

Who they were

Mariam Baouardy was born in Ibillin, in Galilee, to a poor Melkite Greek Catholic family, orphaned before three and raised by an uncle. At thirteen, refusing an arranged marriage and pressured by a man who demanded she renounce her faith, she was attacked and left for dead. She survived, and attributed her nursing back to life to a lady in blue she ever after identified as the Virgin.

The rest of her life is where the space belongs. She was a domestic servant across the Levant and France who entered Carmel as a lay sister, the kitchen grade, which she loved, and whose interior life ran off every scale her superiors possessed: ecstasies, reported levitations, and the stigmata, examined in her lifetime and weighed at her cause. Sent to found Carmels, she built one at Mangalore and then the one that was her heart's work, the Carmel of Bethlehem, raised on a hill she chose, where, supervising the construction, she fell and died of the injury at thirty two. She was canonized in 2015 together with St. Marie-Alphonsine Ghattas, the Holy Land's two daughters raised in one Mass.

Why people turn to St. Mariam Baouardy

The Christians of the Holy Land, with Marie-Alphonsine. Orphans and the uprooted. And everyone whose station is the kitchen grade of their world, since her joy there is the patronage. Her nickname for herself, the little nothing, was spoken laughing.

How to ask their intercession

One decade offered in your lowest role of the week, cheerfully. That was her entire spirituality and she found it funny.