Mariam Baouardy

Mariam Baouardy, known in religion as Mary of Jesus Crucified and sometimes called the Little Arab, was born on 5 January 1846 in Ibillin, a village in Galilee then under Ottoman rule, to Giries Baouardy and Mariam Chahine, who were Melkite Greek Catholics. After years of childlessness and the deaths in infancy of twelve sons, her parents made a pilgrimage to Bethlehem to pray for a surviving child; Mariam was born after that pilgrimage, and a brother, Boulos, followed. Both parents died of illness in 1848, when she was about two years old. She was raised by a paternal uncle, while Boulos was taken by an aunt. The uncle’s household later settled in Alexandria, Egypt, where she grew up amid a mixed Christian and Muslim urban population.

When she was about thirteen, her uncle arranged a marriage for her. She refused, saying that she wished to belong only to God, and was thereafter treated as a menial in the house. Traditional accounts of her life relate that she was assaulted by a Muslim man who sought her conversion to Islam and that her throat was cut; she later said that she was tended in a cave by a woman in blue whom she believed to be the Virgin Mary, and that the wound was healed, leaving a scar. She then lived as a domestic servant in Alexandria and in other cities of the eastern Mediterranean, including Jerusalem and Beirut, before entering the service of a family that brought her to Marseille.

In 1865 she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition in Marseille. There she began to experience frequent ecstasies and received the stigmata, phenomena that unsettled the community, and she was not admitted to religious profession. With priestly help she was received in 1867 into the Discalced Carmel of Pau in southwestern France as a lay sister, taking the name Mary of Jesus Crucified. She remained poorly educated and for a long time illiterate, yet her sisters recorded visions, prophecies, levitations, and knowledge of distant events. In 1870 she joined a group sent to found a Carmel at Mangalore in India. Tensions in that community, partly related to her mystical states, led to her recall to Pau in 1872.

From Pau she was chosen to help establish a Carmelite monastery in Bethlehem, a project she had long desired. She arrived in the Holy Land in 1875 and took a practical part in the building of the convent, living in poverty and continuing to report ecstasies and the stigmata. She also encouraged a future foundation at Nazareth. In August 1878 she suffered a fall while doing manual work, injuring an arm; gangrene developed, and she died in Bethlehem on 26 August 1878 at the age of thirty-two. She was buried in the monastery she had helped to found.

Her reputation for holiness spread in Carmelite circles and among Melkite and Latin Catholics of the Near East. Pope John Paul II beatified her in Rome on 13 November 1983. Pope Francis canonized her on 17 May 2015, together with another Palestinian religious, Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghattas, and two French nuns. The Catholic Church keeps her feast on 26 August. She is venerated as a nineteenth-century mystic and stigmatist and as a saint of Palestinian and Melkite origin.