Saint Mariana of Jesus de Paredes

Saint Mariana of Jesus de Paredes was a laywoman of Quito and a Franciscan tertiary. She lived in seclusion at home, prayed, did penance, and served the poor, and in 1645 she offered her life to God for the people of a city struck by earthquakes and plague. She is called the Lily of Quito. The Church commemorates her on May 26.

She was born on October 31, 1618, in Quito, in present-day Ecuador, into a noble family of Spanish origin. She was orphaned early and grew up in the care of her older sister. The Jesuit Juan Camacho admitted her to Holy Communion at an early age and guided her inner life, and from then on Jesuits were her spiritual directors. At about the age of ten, with her confessor’s permission, she privately made vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

She wanted to set out with her cousins to the indigenous people of the land of Maynas to preach the faith to them, and later to live as a hermit on Mount Pichincha above the city, but both plans failed. The nuns of the monastery of Saint Catherine and the Poor Clares invited her to join them, but her spiritual director judged that she was called to seek perfection in her own home. At about the age of twelve she moved into a room set apart for her. She left it once a day to go to the Jesuit church for Mass, Holy Communion, and a talk with her spiritual director.

Her day was filled with prayer, the Liturgy of the Hours, spiritual reading, and the work of her hands. She fasted, wore a hair shirt, and slept only two or three hours, and she took up her mortifications in obedience to her confessors. She belonged to the Third Order of Saint Francis, but she did not enter a monastery and remained a laywoman to the end. She baked bread for the hungry, sewed clothes for the poor, washed their heads and feet, nursed the sick, and taught the household servants to pray the rosary. The Roman Martyrology says that she devoted her strength to the poor indigenous people and to Black people.

In early 1645 an earthquake destroyed Riobamba, and the tremors were felt in Quito as well, which was already being ravaged by plague. On the fourth Sunday of Lent, during public prayers in the Jesuit church, her confessor, Father Alonso de Rojas, declared from the pulpit that he was ready to give his life to save the people. Mariana then offered herself to God in his place. Soon afterward she fell ill and suffered greatly for two months, while the plague and the earthquakes ceased. She died on May 26, 1645, at the age of twenty-six, and was buried in the Jesuit church, as she had wished. According to tradition, a white lily sprang up from her blood, which had been poured out in the garden.

Pius IX issued the brief of beatification in 1847, but because of the difficult times the solemn beatification was celebrated only on November 20, 1853. Pius XII canonized her on July 9, 1950, and set her memorial on May 26. The next day he reminded pilgrims that Ecuador honors her as its national heroine.