I really love learning about the saints. Every saint has a story and there is so much we can learn from each one of them. May 26 is the feast day of St. Mariana de Jesus de Paredes, who was born into an aristocratic family in Quito, Ecuador in the early 17th century. I remember that when I was a missionary in Ecuador from 1996 to 1999, a time of great economic and political turmoil in that country, there was a trolley stop that I used to pass by that was named Mariana de Jesus in her honor. What I love about the saints is how their witness speaks so strongly to us many centuries later in our own modern era and how they still have so much to teach us.
Mariana de Jesus was not accepted into a religious order as a sister or nun, so she lived out her life as a Third Order Franciscan, serving the poor through a school and clinic that she founded to help the poor African Americans and indigenous people who lived in the city of Quito. When a terrible plague affected the city, she nursed the sick, did penance, and offered her life up to God, hoping that the plague would be lifted. She died shortly afterwards at the age of 31. Mariana de Jesus, who was denied entrance into a religious community as a nun, is now a beloved saint in Latin America, and is one of the patron saints of the country of Ecuador. Mariana de Jesus is venerated at the La Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús in the historic center of Quito, a beautiful church where I used to attend mass as a missionary. That church is considered one of the finest examples of Spanish baroque architecture in all of South America. May we lift up our sufferings and use them for the glory of God just as Mariana de Jesus did so long ago.
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