On August 23 the Church honors St. Rose of Lima (1586-1617), the first person born in the Americas to be canonized a saint. Born Isabel Flores de Oliva in Lima on April 20, 1586, the daughter of a Spanish harquebusier and a criolla mother, she took the name Rose at her confirmation by the Archbishop of Lima, St. Turibius de Mogrovejo. She was a Dominican tertiary, living in her parents' home, spending her days in prayer, fasting, and care for the poor of the city — selling her needlework and flowers in the market to help the sick and hungry.
Rose's life was one of severe penance and intense devotion. She built a hermitage in the family garden where she spent hours in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. She died on August 24, 1617, at the age of thirty-one. Her funeral was held in the Cathedral of Lima, attended by all the public authorities. She was beatified by Clement IX in 1667 and canonized by Clement X on April 12, 1671 — the first American-born saint. Clement X declared her patroness of the Americas, Peru, and the Philippines, a patronage confirmed by subsequent popes.
Her relics are enshrined in the Basilica of Santo Domingo at Lima — the same Dominican convent where her friends St. Martin de Porres and St. John Macías are also buried. Her skull, surmounted with a crown of roses, is displayed in a reliquary in the basilica. The Santuario de Santa Rosa de Lima, built on the site of her birthplace and family home, preserves the hermitage she built in the garden and the well into which devotees drop letters of petition — a tradition unbroken since her death in 1617.
In Peru, August 30 is a public holiday in her honour, and the annual pilgrimage to the Santuario draws tens of thousands who walk through the night. Her feast in the universal calendar is August 23 (moved from August 30 in the 1969 reform, because August 24 is the feast of St. Bartholomew). She is patroness of Peru, of the Americas, of the Philippines, and of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
