05281645 Saint Mariana Jesus Paredes
Portrait of St. Mariana de Jesus by by Antonio Salas (1845)
Mariana de Jesus de Paredes (1618 – 1645) is a Catholic saint and was the first person to be canonized from what is now Ecuador. She was a recluse who is said to have sacrificed herself for the salvation of her city. She was beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1853 and canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1950. She is the patroness saint of Ecuador. Her relics are in the Church of the Society of Jesus in Quito. Her feast day is celebrated on May 26, and on May 28 in the Franciscan Order.
She was born Mariana de Paredes Flores y Granobles y Jaramillo in the city of Quito, then part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, on October 31, 1618. Born of aristocratic parents on both sides of her family, her father was Jeronimo de Paredes Flores y Granobles, a nobleman of Toledo, and her mother was Mariana Jaramillo, a descendant of one of the leading conquistadors.
Mariana was the youngest of eight children, and it is claimed her birth was accompanied by most unusual phenomena in the heavens, clearly connected with the child and juridically attested at the time of the process of her beatification. Orphaned at the age of four, she was taken in and raised by her older sister, Jeronima de Paredes, and the latter's husband, Cosme de Caso.
Drawn to a spiritual life, her sister and brother-in-law allowed her to live in seclusion in their house, leading an ascetical lifestyle, similar to Rose of Lima to whom she is often compared. She refused entry into a monastery, despite urging from her brother-in-law and guardian Cosme de Caso. She subjected herself to bodily mortification, with the aid of her Indian servant. She did not live in total seclusion, but rather centered her spiritual life on the nearby Jesuit church,.
It is reported that the fast which Paredes kept was so strict that she took scarcely an ounce of dry bread every eight or ten days. The food which miraculously sustained her life, as in the case of Catherine of Siena and Rose of Lima, was, according to the sworn testimony of many witnesses, the Eucharist alone, which she received every morning at Mass.
Paredes' spiritual life was closely connected to the Jesuits, but, at the suggestion of her spiritual director, she became a member of the Third Order of St. Francis. This was likely advised to her as enrolling in that Order gave her an official status reflective of her penitential way of life in Spanish society, for which the Jesuits had no equivalent. She did not go to the Franciscan church to receive the scapular and rope cincture proclaiming membership in that life, but sent someone else.
Following Paredes' death in 1645, her funeral and burial were held in the Jesuit church. The sermon became a key document in the long process to establish her saintliness, beatification (1853), and final canonization (1950). The Friars Minor claimed Paredes as a saint of the Franciscan Order. She did wear the Franciscan scapular and cord, but her 17th-century Jesuit hagiographer, Jacinto Moran de Butron, claims that the Jesuits nurtured her spiritual life.
Paredes possessed an ecstatic gift of prayer and is said to have been able to predict the future, see distant events as if they were passing before her, read the secrets of hearts, cure diseases by a mere sign of the Cross or by sprinkling the sufferer with holy water, and at least once restored a dead person to life.
During the 1645 earthquakes and subsequent epidemics in Quito, she publicly offered herself as a victim for the city and died shortly thereafter. It is also reported that, on the day she died, her sanctity was revealed immediately after her death, a pure white lily sprang up from her blood, blossomed and bloomed, a prodigy which has given her the title of "The Lily of Quito".
This image is a public domain image, which means either that copyright has expired in the image or the copyright holder has waived their copyright. Franciscan Gallery charges for the access to high resolution copy of the image. Manually restoration was necessary in order to improve quality, without covering the original image.
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