Saturday, August 23
St. Rose of Lima. Bartolome Esteban Murillo, undated. Museo Lazaro Galdiano, Madrid.
And a happy St. Rose of Lima's day to St. Blog's Parish, especially to all Dominican tertiaries, to Emily on her middle-name-day and to the three generations of Rosas among my relatives. St. Rose, baptized Isabel, was given her more well-known name at Confirmation, a sacrament dispensed to her by none other than Bishop St. Turibius de Mogrovenjo, and later went on, after founding the first social work institutions in Peru and receiving invisible stigmata and a mystical marriage from Christ, to become the first canonized Saint of the Americas, proclaimed in 1671 by Pope Clement X. In addition to being patroness of Peru, Central America, the Americas, Latin America, florists, embroiderers, needleworkers, South America, and the Phillipines, she is also the patroness of those ridiculed for their piety, a protectress I'm sure my fellow Whapsters can appreciate. Check out this image of her from Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart.
Today is also the feast of a St. Zaccheus, who may either be the Gospel figure or the martyred deacon Zaccheus whose feast day is more typically celebrated with his cousin Alphaeus on November 17. Today is also the day which recalls St. Ebbe or Aebbe the Younger, an abbess of a double monastery at Coldingham in Scotland, who with her nuns was burned to death by Viking raiders on 2 April 870 after she and her charges had mutilated themselves to escape being raped. Lastly, today is the feast of Bl. James of Mevania (or Bevagna), a Dominican friar known for his life of strict poverty and has the peculiar honor of having been beatified (or at least having his cult confirmed) by two popes on two separate occasions. Well, why not?
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
