World

SAINT PROFILE: ROSE OF LIMA

By CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE     9/1/2020

Born in Lima, Peru, the infant Isabel de Flores got her more familiar name from an Indian maid who said she was “like a rose.” As a child Rose was given to fasting and mortification. After her parents refused to let her enter the convent and she refused to marry, she lived at home in seclusion. At 20 she joined the Third Order of St. Dominic, using a backyard hut for prayer and caring for poor children and elderly sick in a one-room infirmary in her parents’ home. She died at 31, and was declared the first saint from the Americas in 1671.