Saint of the Month: St. Mary of Jesus Crucified

St. Mary of Jesus Crucified was a Carmelite religious and mystic. Mariam Baouardy was born to George Baouardy and his wife Mariam in 1846 at Abellin in what was Ottoman Syria, near the ancient town of Nazareth. They were Melkite Greek Catholics. Her parents had lost twelve sons in infancy, and Mariam was conceived after her parents made a pilgrimage on foot to Bethlehem. A son was born to this family in 1848. When Mariam was nearly three years old, her parents died, due to illness, within days of each other. She was taken in by a paternal uncle and her brother by a maternal aunt. From childhood, Mariam was unusually devout, and began fasting on Saturdays at age five. She had a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary. When she was eight, she was taken to Alexandria, Egypt with the uncle’s family. She never attended a school and was illiterate. When she was thirteen, her uncle arranged a marriage for her. The night before the planned wedding, she had a mystical experience which caused her to renounce marriage and remain chaste. When her uncle learned of this, he beat her, which did nothing to change her resolve. He assigned her as a kitchen servant in his home. Wishing to be reunited with her brother, who was still living in Nazareth, she wrote him a letter, asking a Muslim servant to help her send the letter. He instead, tried to pursue her romantically and force her to renounce her Christian Faith and become Muslim. When she refused, he slit her throat and left her for dead in an alley.

MYSTERIOUS NURSING

When Mariam regained consciousness, she was being tended to by a mysterious woman in blue, who stitched her four-inch wound and brought her to an unknown grotto. The woman nursed her back to health for a month. She would later state that the mysterious woman was none other than the Virgin Mary.After her recovery, Mariam found work as a domestic servant in Alexandria. Still a teenager and seeking to meet her brother, she travelled to Jerusalem and made a private vow of perpetual chastity at the Holy Sepulchre. She set out for Acre by boat, but bad weather forced a landing at Beirut, where she again found domestic work. Her Arab employers, the Nadjar family decided to move to Marseilles, France, and Mariam went with them to serve as their cook. At Marseilles, she knew she was called to enter religious life. She was rejected by several congregations, but by the spring of 1865, she was accepted at age nineteen by the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition.

MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES INTENSIFY

During her postulancy, Mariam received the stigmata, a rare spiritual gift, in which the recipient bears the wounds of Christ’s passion. At the conclusion of her two-year postulancy, she was not invited to continue as a novice. However, the superior, Mother Veronica, left this congregation to prepare to form a new Carmelite congregation to serve in India. Before going to the Carmelite monastery at Pau, she recommended Mariam to the community, and the two arrived at Pau together. They both were given the Carmelite habit and Mariam was given the name Mary of Jesus Crucified. At Pau, her mystical experiences increased.
In 1870, Sister Mary was part of an initial group sent from Pau to Mangalore, India, where they established the first Carmel in that nation. Because of the confusion and difficulty caused by her mystical experiences, she returned to Pau in 1871, and made her final vows there. Despite efforts to learn to read and write, Sister Mary was unable to master this. Despite this, her theological knowledge and wise counsel were admired by her sisters. She was greatly devoted to the Holy Spirit and encouraged devotion to Him. By 1875, she believed that she was to found a new congregation at Bethlehem. She obtained the sponsorship of a generous donor and set off to select the site.

BETHLEHEM CARMEL

The illiterate Sister Mary herself planned the architecture and directed the construction. It was the first Carmelite monastery in the region. In 1878, she discerned that there was to be a Carmel at Nazareth. On the way there, she had a mystical revelation of the location of the true town of Emmaus, where Our Lord revealed Himself on the evening of His resurrection. In August of that year, while helping some workers at the Bethlehem construction site, she broke her arm in a bad fall. The wound soon became gangrenous, and she died there August 26, 1878 at age thirty-two. Her body is buried at the Bethlehem Carmel.St. Mary of Jesus Crucified lived a life of great devotion since early childhood, despite horrendous setbacks. She was a rare mystic, experiencing ecstasies each day, mysterious knowledge, bilocation and a transpierced heart. She was known to emit a pleasant fragrance while wearing no perfume. She was fondly referred to by her sisters as “the Little Arab”, but she referred to herself as “the Little Nothing”. At her 1983 beatification, Pope [St.] John Paul asked her intercession for peace in her deeply troubled homeland. She was canonized in 2015, just the second Greek Catholic raised to the honors of the altar. Her feast day is August 26.