Mary of Jesus Crucified Baouardy (1846–1877)

Biography

He received baptism in the Melkite Greek Catholic rite. His life is a prodigy and in it he saw the hand of God palpably. She was orphaned as a young girl and an uncle took her to Alexandria, Egypt, where she made her First Communion. They promised her in marriage to a young man, but she, to preserve the virginity that she had promised to God, fled the house without giving notice of her whereabouts. For refusing to convert to her religion, a Muslim seriously injured her, leaving her for dead on the outskirts of the city. She was miraculously healed through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, and entered a convent in Alexandria, from where she went to Jerusalem, Beirut and then to Marseille. In that city she entered the convent of the Sisters of San José de la Aparión where they called her “the little Arab.” While she was still a postulant, they dismissed her because of the extraordinary facts of her spiritual life for which they judged her to be more suitable for the contemplative life than for the active one. She changed to the habit of Carmel and received the name Mary of Jesus Crucified. In 1867 she left for Mangalore, India, and from there to Palestine, prompted by the Holy Spirit, to found a contemplative Carmel in Bethlehem. He died holy at 33 years of age and 12 years of religious life. The Lord took this saint along paths of high mysticism and extraordinary phenomena throughout her life. She, on the contrary, was extremely simple and humble and made an effort to go unnoticed. He participated for a long time in the sufferings of the Passion of Christ, especially in Lent, when the stigmata appeared on his body.