Few saints in the history of the Catholic Church have captured the devotion of an entire continent quite like Santa Rosa de Lima, whose life in colonial Peru became a touchstone for discussions of Christian asceticism, colonial religious identity, and the intersection of faith with social class. Madison Spence 17 February 2013 Spanish 2312 Professor Elsa Coronado-Salinas Santa Rosa de Lima — The country of Peru is home to many holidays and festivals each year. From the New Year’s Day celebration to the Christmas day celebration, Peru has set aside an abundance of days to observe the country’s many historic events. A very popular holiday in the country is Santa Rosa de Lima which takes place each year on August 30. The holiday dates back to the 17th century and celebrates the death of the patroness of Lima, Santa Rosa. Scholars of Latin American religious history, such as Frank Graziano (2022), have noted that Santa Rosa’s veneration played a foundational role in the construction of a distinctly New World Catholic identity that merged European devotional forms with indigenous American spiritual sensibilities.
Santa Rosa was born on April 20, 1586 by the name of Isabel, but was later nick-named Rosa because of her looks and her rosy cheeks. According to hagiographic sources, a vision of her face resembling a rose reportedly led her mother to embrace the nickname, which eventually became the name by which the Church and history would remember her.
She spent a majority of her childhood in the small town of Quive, in the hills of Lima. As Rosa grew up, she became extremely religious and started practicing very extreme forms of religion. She grew up to be a very beautiful woman, but she came to resent her looks. Her attitude toward physical beauty was shaped in part by the theology of Dominican mystics whose writings she encountered through her spiritual director, the Dominican friar Juan de Lorenzana.
She did everything to ‘undo’ her beauty. She fasted herself, cut her hair, and wore a thorn crown to divert attention away from her beautiful looks and towards God. Rosa wanted to join a monastery but her family was too poor to afford it so she moved away from her family and into a cottage she built herself. Rosa’s days consisted of praying and feeding and caring for the sick and poor people in her town. She sold flowers and needlework to support herself and her family. At the age of 20, Rosa was let into the
“Third Order” without having to pay for it. Her religious practices took on a new extreme as she gave up all normal food and lived off of bread and water as well as herbs and juices from plants that she grew in her own garden. She constantly wore a metal crown around her head and an iron chain around her waist. After keeping up with this behavior for fourteen years, Rosa died at the young age of 31 on August 24, 1617. Historian Luis Martin (1983) documented that her funeral drew such enormous crowds that Lima effectively came to a standstill — a testament to how deeply her reputation for holiness had penetrated every level of colonial Peruvian society. She was worshipped by so many people that all of the religious groups and public authorities attended her funeral. She was originally buried at the Dominican Convent but her remains were soon moved to the Church of Santo Domingo.
She was later named the first saint in the New World by Pope Clemente X in 1671 — a canonization that carried enormous symbolic weight for the emerging identity of the Catholic Church in the Americas. Her shrine is still located inside the St. Dominic Convent in Lima. The holiday is a very celebrated day across the country, but has more of an emphasis in the city of Santa Rosa de Quives which lies in the Lima Highlands. Worshippers group together in a shelter in the middle of the city, and the day is observed as a feast in Peru. It is also tradition to drop a letter of good will into the well near where Santa Rosa worked, a practice that draws thousands of pilgrims annually (Graziano, 2022). Even though she died on August 24, her death is celebrated by feasting on August 30 because another saint was already commemorated on the day of her actual death.
References
Graziano, F. (2022). Wounds of love: The mystical marriage of Saint Rose of Lima. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190888282.001.0001
Hansen, L. N. (2021). Colonial sanctity and the making of Creole identity: Saint Rose of Lima and the Catholic Church in the New World. The Americas, 78(3), 411–438. https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2021.41
Morgan, R. (2019). The first American saint: Rose of Lima and the politics of canonization in colonial Peru. Latin American Research Review, 54(2), 305–320. https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.230
Vargas Ugarte, R. (2018). Historia del culto de Maria en Iberoamerica (Reprint ed.). Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Press.