Saint Rose of Lima, Virgin

Isabel Flores de Oliva was born in Lima in 1586, in Spanish Peru, and was called Rosa for her beauty. She refused to marry and, taking Catherine of Siena as her model, became a Dominican tertiary at twenty, living at home in a small hut she built in the family garden. She supported her parents with needlework and growing flowers, and took in poor, sick and elderly people, among them Indigenous and enslaved people, to care for them in a room of the house. Her penances were extreme, and the accounts of her life tell of mystical experiences. She died on 24 August 1617, aged 31. Canonized in 1671, she was the first saint born in the Americas.