A Guadalajara-born nun who dedicated her life to helping the poor was among 802 new saints named by Pope Francis in the Vatican on Sunday.
The record-breaking canonization ceremony included hundreds of 15th-century martyrs who were beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam, as well as Colombia’s first saint.
Presiding at the ceremony in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis praised the compassion and tenderness of Guadalajara nun María Guadalupe García Zavala, who “renounced a comfortable life to follow the call of Jesus and taught (people) how to love the poor.”
Francis commended her for “kneeling on the floor” to attend to the infirm.
Madre Lupita, as she is referred to locally, co-founded the Sisters of St. Margaret Mary and the Poor Congregation and ran the Santa Margarita Hospital in Calle Garibaldi in the Capilla de Jesus neighborhood of Guadalajara.Some 400 Mexican Catholics attended Sunday’s ceremony in Rome, including Cardinal Jose Francisco Robles, the archbishop of Guadalajara, and his predecessor, Juan Sandoval, who first met Madre Lupita in 1946, when he was 13 years old.
“She was very saintly, and fed me when I was in the seminary,” Sandoval said. “She was full of charity and very brave, especially at the time of the religious persecution.”
During the anti-clerical Cristero War of the 1920s, Madre Lupita hid persecuted priests and even the archbishop of Guadalajara from government troops.
Dozens of nuns from the 11 St. Margaret Mary foundations in Mexico and 22 in other countries traveled to Rome to attend the ceremony.
Madre Lupita, who becomes Mexico’s second female saint, first worked as a nurse in the congregation’s small hospital, attending to the poor and needy of Guadalajara. When times were hard she would often take to the streets herself to seek donations. She died in 1963 at the age of 85 and was beatified in 2003.
The miracle required for her canonization also occurred in that year when an 82-year-old woman arrived unconscious at the hospital. Doctors there diagnosed her with a brain hemorrhage and recommended for her to be taken to the IMSS Centro Medico. But before she left her children prayed for Madre Lupita’s intercession in the hospital’s chapel. The woman soon regained consciousness and made a full recovery.
Armando Gonzalez Escoto, a 30-year priest and specialist in Catholic affairs, told El Informador newspaper that Madre Lupita was “a leader in an age when the role of women was limited” and that she serves as “an example of what a woman can achieve when she has a attitude of solidarity toward the most needy.”
Sandoval said the canonization of Madre Lupita should not be considered “a feminist revindication” but “recognition of a special Mexican.”
Several masses were held at churches in the Guadalajara metropolitan area on Sunday in honor of her sainthood.
As well as Madre Lupita, Colombia’s first saint was named on Sunday. Laura of St. Catherine of Siena Montoya y Upegui is renowned as a teacher and spiritual guide to indigenous people.
Pope Francis also canonized 813 Italians, known as the Martyrs of Otranto, who were slain in 1480 in the Salentine city of Otranto in southern Italy for refusing to renounce Christianity and convert to Islam when the city fell to a Turkish force.