SANTA ROSA DE LIMA

Santa Rosa de Lima

 Santa Rosa de Lima was born April 30, 1586, in the vicinity of the hospital of the Holy Spirit of the city of Lima, then capital of the Viceroyalty of the Peru. Its original name was Isabel Flores de Oliva. It was one of the thirteen children made in the marriage of Gaspar Flores, arquebus of the Viceregal, natural guard of San Juan de Puerto Rico, with the Lima Oliva María. He received baptism in the parish of San Sebastián de Lima, being his godparents Hernando de Valdés and María Orozco.

In the company of his many brothers, the pink girl moved to the town of Quives, in the basin of the Chillon, when his father took the job of administrator of a mill where silver ore was refined. Biographies of Santa Rosa de Lima have firmly withheld the fact that in this town, it was doctrine of mercedarian friars, in 1597, the young woman received the sacrament of confirmation at the hands of the Archbishop of Lima, Santo Toribio Alonso de Mogrovejo, who made a pastoral visit in the jurisdiction.

 Dealing with the "dark phase" in the biography of Santa Rosa de Lima, which corresponds precisely to their years of childhood and adolescence in Quives, Luis million has sought to shed light through the interpretation of dreams that biographers of the santa. View million that could be the most important stage for the formation of their personality, despite the fact that the authors have preferred to make abstraction of the economic environment and cultural experiences that influenced the life of the Flores-Oliva family in the mountains, a mining seat linked to the heart of the colonial production. Probably, that experience (daily view of the sufferings that Indian workers suffered from) might be that gave to Rosa concern cure disease and misery of those who would believe in virtue.

Lived at Santa Rosa de Lima in Lima an atmosphere of religious effervescence, a time in which abounded the powers of miracles, cures and all sorts of wonders by a population that put great emphasis on the virtues and quality of life Christian. Around of sixty people, they died in "odor of sanctity" in the Peruvian capital between late 16th century and the mid-eighteenth. Here originated by the way a long series of biographies of Saints, blesseds, and servants of God, works very similar in their content, governed by the same formal structures and similar categories of thought.

Attracted to Santa Rosa with singular force model of the dominica Catherine of Siena (Tuscany santa from the 14th century), and it was decided to change the Franciscan sackcloth for the white habit of a tertiary of the order of preachers, apparently from 1606. It is claimed was well equipped for the work of sewing, which helped sustain the family budget, but were very few people with whom Rosa came to have some privacy. In its most narrow circle were virtuous women as Doña Luisa Melgarejo and his group of "beatas", together with friends of the paternal home and close to the home of Gonzalo de la Maza counter.

 Confessors of Santa Rosa de Lima were mostly priests of the Dominican congregation. He also had spiritual contact with religious of the society of Jesus. It is also important to contact who developed with the doctor Juan de el Castillo, Extremadura doctor well versed in matters of spirituality, with whom he shared the most secret minutiae of their relationship with God.

These spiritual advisers exerted profound influence on rose and were complicit in his delusions, visions and torment. Not surprising of course Oliva María abominase of the cohort of priests who surrounded his pious daughter, because I was sure that the rigors that she was imposed were "being this seem, ignorant credulity and trial some confessors", recalls a contemporary. The stereotyped behavior of Santa Rosa de Lima is most evident while he repaired by order of their confessors scored the various mercedes he had received from the sky, thus composing the panel titled spiritual scale. Not much is known about the readings of Santa Rosa, although it is known that he found inspiration in the theological works of fray Luis de Granada.