St. Rose of Lima

Who they were

Isabel Flores de Oliva of Lima, called Rose from infancy for her beauty, which she spent her life deflecting, took Catherine of Siena as her model: no convent, but a Dominican tertiary's habit and a hermitage in the family garden.

The economics of her holiness are the part worth leading with, because they are documented and bracing. When her family fell into hardship, Rose supported them with her needlework and by selling the flowers she grew, working by the accounts ten hours a day, and turned a room of the family home into an infirmary where she nursed the city's poor, with particular and recorded care for Indigenous and enslaved people the colonial city ranked last. Her severe penances are part of her record and belong in it briefly and honestly, along with the Church's own mature note: her confessors moderated them at the time, and the Church today counsels imitation of her charity rather than her austerities. She died at thirty one, and Lima shut down for the funeral.

Why people turn to St. Rose of Lima

Latino and Filipino families, two of American Catholicism's great pillars. Gardeners and florists by her trade. And everyone earning with their hands to hold a family together, which was her actual daily life.

How to ask their intercession

Over the work that supports the family: the second job, the overtime, the garden that has to produce.