Female Saints
St. Mary of Jesus of Ágreda, Santa María de Jesús de Ágreda (1602-1665), was 16 years old when she, her mother Catalina and sister Jerónima entered the Order of Conceptionist nuns, converting their home (in 1619) into a convento, whose expanded reconstruction began in 1627. Her likeness occasionally appears in Mexico, either as a proselytizer, as in José de Páez’s mid-18th century painting of her, or in the cases at Landa de Matamoros (Querétaro) and La Guadalupe (Zacatecas) as an author, most likely in the processes of penning her six-volume Mystical City of God (Mística Ciudad de Dios, Vida de la Virgen María). The work was first published in Madrid in 1670 although shortly banned by Pope Innocent XI because it promoted the belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, not merely that of Christ himself. This construct was not Catholic dogma until as late as 1854, despite the fact that the Franciscans actively championed it as actuality. Ágreda’s influence in the New World was largely felt in the modern-day state of New Mexico at the Salinas Missions South of Albuquerque, now in ruins. Gifted with the mystical phenomenon of bilocation, even as a young child María had experienced ecstatic visions in the presence of the Lord. In the 1620s she began having particularly intense dreams, thought to be more like hypnotically altered states. During these reveries Ágreda was conveyed to a distant continent where she taught the Gospel to an idolatrous people. This land presented itself as modern day New Mexico and West Texas, and the pagans as indigenous Americans including the Jumanos. |