Mary of Jesus of Ágreda

Mary of Jesus of Ágreda was born María Coronel y Arana on 2 April 1602 in the town of Ágreda, in the province of Soria within the Crown of Castile. Her parents, Francisco Coronel and Catalina de Arana, belonged to the hidalgo class and were known for their devout Catholic faith. Around 1618 the entire family underwent a collective religious conversion: Francisco and his two sons entered the Franciscan Order as friars, while Catalina, María, and María’s sister Jerónima converted their family residence into a monastery of the Order of the Immaculate Conception, a Franciscan congregation of nuns founded in the late fifteenth century by Beatrice of Silva. The young María took the religious name Mary of Jesus and made her profession in the newly established community.

Despite her youth she was elected abbess in 1627, when she was twenty-five, and she governed the monastery for most of the next four decades, interrupted only by a short interval in the 1650s. Under her leadership the community observed strict enclosure and a life of prayer, penance, and work. She was regarded by her sisters as a model of humility and obedience even while exercising authority. Throughout these years she also experienced intense mystical phenomena, including reported ecstasies, visions, and locutions, which she recorded under obedience to her confessors.

Her principal literary work is The Mystical City of God (Mística Ciudad de Dios), a lengthy narrative of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary from her Immaculate Conception to her Assumption, presented as having been revealed in private visions. She composed a first version in the 1630s, destroyed it at the command of a temporary confessor, and rewrote it between 1655 and 1660. After her death the book was published and quickly translated into several languages; it became both a popular devotional text and an object of theological controversy, particularly concerning its claims of private revelation and its treatment of the Immaculate Conception, which was widely believed in Spain but not yet defined as dogma. The Spanish Inquisition examined the work and its author but issued no condemnation. She also left letters, spiritual treatises, and an autobiography.

A distinctive element of her reputation is the tradition of bilocation. Beginning in the 1620s, Franciscan missionaries in New Spain reported that groups of Jumano Indians in the regions of present-day New Mexico and west Texas had requested baptism and claimed they had been taught the Christian faith by a woman wearing a blue habit who appeared among them, sometimes healing the sick. When some of these missionaries later traveled to Spain they identified Sister Mary of Jesus as the figure described by the Indians. She herself stated that, while remaining bodily in her convent, she had been transported in spirit on numerous occasions to evangelize native peoples of the New World. These reports, circulating in both Spain and the Americas, earned her the popular designations Lady in Blue and the Blue Nun.

From 1643 until her death she maintained a confidential correspondence with King Philip IV of Spain, who sought her counsel on matters of conscience, politics, and the welfare of the monarchy; hundreds of letters survive. She died in the Ágreda monastery on 24 May 1665. When her tomb was later opened the body was found incorrupt, and it remains so, vested in the Conceptionist habit and visible in the monastery church. A canonical process for beatification was introduced in the seventeenth century and she was declared Venerable, but the cause has not proceeded to beatification or canonization. Devotion to her continues in Spain and among communities in the American Southwest that recall the Lady-in-Blue tradition.