Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghattas

Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghattas was born Soultaneh Maria Ghattas on 4 October 1843 in Jerusalem, then under Ottoman rule, into a Palestinian Arab Christian family of the Latin Catholic community. Drawn to religious life from childhood, she entered the Congregation of Saint Joseph of the Apparition in 1858, while still in her mid-teens, and took the religious name Marie-Alphonsine. As a sister of that French congregation she worked as a teacher and catechist among the local population in several Palestinian towns, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem, at a period when formal schooling for Arab girls was rare.

In the 1870s she reported private revelations in which the Virgin Mary asked her to found a congregation of native Arab women devoted to the Holy Rosary, who would educate girls, serve the poor, and support the Church in the Holy Land. Bound by her existing vows of obedience, she could not act on her own. She confided the request to Father Joseph Tannous of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, who obtained ecclesiastical approval. The Congregation of the Dominican Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary of Jerusalem, commonly called the Rosary Sisters, was established in 1880 as the first religious institute of Palestinian women. After a dispensation from her former vows, Marie-Alphonsine transferred to the new community in 1883.

Inside the Rosary Sisters she refused positions of government and lived as an ordinary religious, teaching, nursing, and assisting in the congregation’s schools and charitable works. Those works served Christian and Muslim families and helped make girls’ education more widely available in the region. She spent her later years in houses of the institute, including the community at Ein Karem near Jerusalem, and died there on 25 March 1927, the feast of the Annunciation.

Her reputation for holiness led to a cause for canonization. She was beatified on 22 November 2009 at the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth by Cardinal Angelo Amato, acting for Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Francis canonized her on 17 May 2015 in Saint Peter’s Square, together with the Palestinian mystic Mariam Baouardy and two other foundresses. She is venerated in the Catholic Church as a pioneer of indigenous women’s religious life in Palestine.