St. Mariam Baouardy (Mary of Jesus Crucified)

Who was St. Mariam Baouardy?

St. Mariam Baouardy, Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified, was a Palestinian Arab Carmelite nun who never learned to read, yet spoke of God with a clarity that astonished priests and theologians. Born in Galilee in 1846 to a Melkite Greek Catholic family, orphaned at three, she worked as a servant across the Middle East and France before entering the Carmel of Pau. She helped found the first Carmel in India and the Carmel of Bethlehem, where she died in 1878 at thirty-two. We keep her feast on August 26.

At her canonization in 2015, Pope Francis said: "Poor and uneducated, she was able to counsel others and provide theological explanations with extreme clarity, the fruit of her constant converse with the Holy Spirit."

A child of Galilee

Mariam was born on January 5, 1846, at Ibillin, a village between Nazareth and Haifa. Her parents, the Carmelite Order's biography says, were very poor and devout Greek-rite Catholics. Both died when she was three, and she and her little brother Paul were separated. She went to an uncle who soon moved to Alexandria in Egypt. She never went to school.

The wound and the lady in blue

When she was thirteen, her uncle arranged a marriage for her, as was the custom. Mariam refused: she wanted to belong to God alone. What followed is the most famous story of her life, and it comes from her own account. She asked a young Muslim servant to carry a letter to her brother. He tried to persuade her to become a Muslim and marry him, and when she refused to give up her faith, he cut her throat and left her for dead in an alley.

Mariam later said that a woman dressed in blue, like a nun, cared for her in a grotto until she recovered, and she understood the woman to be the Blessed Virgin. This healing is reported: it rests on Mariam's own testimony, and the Church has not ruled on it.

After this she worked as a domestic servant in Alexandria, Jerusalem, Beirut and Marseilles.

The road to Carmel

Mariam tried religious life twice before she found her place. At the start of Lent in 1865 she joined the Sisters of Compassion, but fell ill and had to leave. The Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition took her as a postulant for two years, then judged her unsuited to their life. On June 14, 1867, she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery at Pau, in southwestern France.

In August 1870, while still a novice, she sailed with a small group to found a Carmel at Mangalore in India. She made her profession there on November 21, 1871, and took the name Mary of Jesus Crucified. A year later she was called back to Pau.

Graces and trials

Her years in Pau and Mangalore were full of extraordinary things that the sisters and their chaplains witnessed: long ecstasies, the wounds of the stigmata, and what they described as levitations. These are reported: recorded by eyewitnesses at the time, but not part of the Church's judgment on her holiness, which rested on her virtues. She also endured long spiritual darkness and was misunderstood in her own community. She said that she heard herself called "the little nothing."

Founding the Carmel of Bethlehem

In 1875 Mariam left Pau with the founding group for the first Carmel in the Holy Land. She threw herself into building the monastery in Bethlehem, where she could speak with the workers in her own Arabic, and she began planning another Carmel at Nazareth.

In 1878 she fell at the building site. The Carmelite Order's biography says the fracture led to a cancer, and she died in Bethlehem on August 26, 1878.

The miracles of St. Mariam Baouardy

Two miracles were approved for her cause. One opened the way to her beatification by Pope John Paul II on November 13, 1983. The other, needed for canonization, was the healing of a boy in an Italian family through her prayers; Vatican Radio reported that the family carried her relics at the canonization Mass. Pope Francis canonized her on May 17, 2015. Her lifetime wonders, described above, remain reported.

Symbols of St. Mariam Baouardy in art

St. Mariam is shown in the brown habit and white mantle of a Discalced Carmelite, with a black veil, usually with hands joined in prayer. Because she lived in the age of photography, most images follow the real photographs of her, with her round face and dark eyes. Icons from the Holy Land give her a halo and sometimes a dove, for her devotion to the Holy Spirit, or show the Carmel of Bethlehem behind her. Statues in Bethlehem and in Melkite churches in Galilee, such as the church dedicated to her at Hurfeish, show her as a small, gentle nun.

Where St. Mariam is honored

Her tomb is in the church of the Carmel of Bethlehem, and the Carmelite Order notes that both Christians and Muslims come there on pilgrimage. Her relics rest in a reliquary framed in stained glass in the chapel.

The Carmel keeps her feast every August with Mass and crowds of pilgrims. In Galilee, her home village of Ibillin and nearby Melkite parishes honor her as a daughter of the land.

Prayer of St. Mariam to the Holy Spirit

Mariam had a great love for the Holy Spirit, and this short prayer is printed by the Carmelites as hers. Let us pray it with her:

Holy Spirit, inspire me.

Love of God, consume me.

To the right path lead me.

Mary my mother, look down upon me.

With Jesus bless me.

From all evil, all illusion, all danger, preserve me.

You can also pray our longer prayer to the Holy Spirit. St. Mariam Baouardy, pray for peace in the land where Jesus was born. See our feast days page for the saints around her date.