Mariam Bouardy, the "little nothing of Jesus": a saint from East to West

Summary:

Mariam Baouardy was born in the Galilean village of l'billin, Palestine (today's Israel), during the Ottoman Empire. Her parents, Catholics of the Greek Melchite Rite, had twelve children before her, all boys, and none of them survived infancy. In April 1845, her parents went on a pilgrimage to Bethlehem to ask God and Mary for a daughter. Mariam was born exactly nine months later, on January 5, 1846.

Two years after her birth, she was orphaned. She was adopted by her paternal uncle. At the age of 8, after receiving a good Christian education, she was allowed to make her First Communion. Shortly afterwards, she moved with her uncle to Alexandria (Egypt). It was there, on August 8, 1858, that she experienced her "wedding of blood" - her first martyrdom. Her uncle wanted to marry her off against her will at 13 (she wanted to become a nun), so she ran away from home. She was taken in by a Muslim who tried to force her to renounce her faith. She resisted him and prayed to the Lord. In a fit of rage, the man slit her throat, then left her for dead in a street in Alexandria. There, she had her first inexplicable experience: she found herself in "a cave where a nun in azure clothes" sutured her throat and nursed her back to health.

In fact, Mariam survived without anyone ever having come to her aid, apart from the apparition she had mentioned. Some have suggested that the wound was superficial. Quite the opposite: all her life, she was left with a hoarse voice and a visible scar more than ten centimetres wide across her throat. The doctors later found that her trachea was missing several cartilaginous rings. Mariam soon identified the unknown nun as the Virgin Mary. She would see the Mother of God under the same appearance several times in her life.

After the ran away and miraculously survived the attempted killing, she was thirteen and on her own. She found employment as a domestic servant, took one odd job after another, moving from town to town in Lebanon, Palestine and, finally, Marseille (France). While working for a family, she suffered a tragic fall when she was hanging clothes on the terrace, and was thought dead. The doctors gave no hope of recovery. Yet she did recover, to everyone's astonishment. Neighbors, Christians and Muslims alike, fell to their knees and proclaimed it a miracle. (These facts were later confirmed in a letter in 1869, when the prioress of the Carmel of Pau where Mariam was then a sister, wrote to Sister Gélas, the superior of the Daughters of Charity of Beirut, asking her to verify the accuracy of these facts, and the superior confirmed that the events had happened exactly as stated, and even added some further details.)

It was in Marseille that she met the sisters of St Joseph of the Apparition and was accepted as a postulant at the age of 19. During that time she received the stigmata and all kinds of extraordinary graces began to appear. Hoewever she was eventually rejected after two years as she was illiterate and had a poor command of French. The novice mistress told her that she should apply to the Carmelite community in Pau to prepare to join a new congregation of Religious Sisters serving in India, the Sisters of the Apostolic Carmel. In 1867, she entered the Discalced Carmelites at Pau and took the name of Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified. 

It was there, on May 24, 1868, that she received the transverberation of the heart during an ecstasy: she saw an angel drive a red-hot spike into her chest; she felt immense pain, then a feeling of peace invaded her being. Her experience was identical in every way to that of Saint Teresa of Avila in April 1560. But besides the extraordinary experiences, such as the gift of prophecy, the attacks of the devil or ecstasies, the deepest grace she received was the knowledge of her nothingness before God.

In 1870, she was sent to Mangalore with a small group of sisters to found the first Carmelite convent in India. There she took her perpetual vows. Two years later, she returned to France. As the weeks went by, her mystical life took an incredible turn: she had frequent ecstasies in various places (in her cell, in the corridors, in the kitchen, in the refectory, before the Blessed Sacrament...). People would ask her: "Sister, where were you? - In love" she would reply. Each time, it was out of obedience to her superiors that she returned to her senses. Many descriptions of the phenomena have come down to us. Her body generally remained supple, or sometimes stiffened; some saw her "freeze" in an attitude of rapture. No one was able to move her, and she was completely insensitive to external stimuli. Once, when she had been limping for days because of a nail in her knee, she fell into ecstasy: she immediately began to move normally, knelt down and remained in that position for several hours. When she came to, she remembered nothing and complained again of the pain in her knee.

In 1875, she had an important revelation: she learned of the supernatural origin of the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Betharram (southwestern France), founded by Michel Garicoïts, whose constitutions were soon recognized by the Church.

Shortly afterwards, she left Pau and went to Bethlehem with ten other nuns to found a new convent. She was the only one who knew Arabic, and so she supervised the work. While bringing water to the workers on a hot day, she fell and fractured an arm. Gangrene quickly set in and Mariam died a few days later, on August 26, 1878. She was 32 years old.

In addition to the ecstasies and visions, witnesses reported countless extraordinary phenomena. On eight occasions, the saint was seen to rise above the ground, up to several meters (at the Carmelite convent in Pau in June and July 1873 in particular). Father Buzy, her first biographer, recounts that she once reached the top of a tree by holding a scapular in one hand and delicately grasping the end of a branch with the other. She was asked to explain: "How did you get up there?  - The Lamb held out his hands to me."

The stigmata of the Passion appeared on her body according to the liturgical calendar: on Fridays and during Holy Week. Mother Veronica, who dressed these mysterious wounds, recounted: "I can solemnly testify that I saw the blood coming out of the holes made by the thorns, one of which in the middle of my forehead opened up in front of me and the blood gushed out."

The apparitions were many and varied: she saw Jesus, Mary, Saint Joseph, the prophet Elijah, angels... Rationalist doctors have suggested that these were hallucinations caused by an overactive imagination in an excessively religious environment. But this is not true: Mariam's psychological balance, cognitive faculties and sense of reality were never questioned. The same applies to the demonic manifestations she experienced. Some people thought they were the psychosomatic expression of an internal conflict. But no one has ever explained the appearance of various and severe epidermal wounds on the sole basis of a psychological dysfunction, and the number of different marks observed on the saint's body defies explanation.

On three occasions, witnesses discerned cases of true diabolic possession: once in Pau (from 26 June to 4 September 1868) and twice in Mangalore (from May to June 1871, then from July to August the following year). The phenomena that accompanied them terrified those around her: Mariam began to speak in an unknown language (Konkani, spoken in central and northern India by ten million people), the demon blasphemed through her mouth and revealed out loud the faults committed by other nuns (without her having had any natural knowledge of them), and so on.

She also received several prophecies, all of which came true: the date of her death, of her religious profession, of the plans for the convent in Bethlehem, of conventual life in India, and more. One of these prophecies stayed in the Church annals: Mariam warned the Church hierarchy on her own initiative that a bomb attack was going to take place near some military barracks close to the Vatican; her warnings were ignored, and several people died.

Finally, the healings obtained through to her intercession are remarkable. Among a host of testimonies, we should mention that of the doctor who looked after the saint during the last months of her life. This man suffered from a dermatological disease of the foot that made him suffer atrociously, and for which he had no relief. One day, he thought of dipping a handkerchief in the blood coming out of Mariam's stigmata and applied it to his wound: it was healed within a few hours.

Mariam, who called herself the "little nothing" of Jesus Christ, was beatified in 1983, and proclaimed a saint by Pope Francis, on May 17, 2015.

Beyond reasons to believe:

"Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified reflects the different faces of the Church: the Greek-Melkite Church in which she was baptized and brought up, and the Latin Church where she was initiated into Carmelite life. Outside her native country, she became part of the Christian communities of Lebanon, Egypt, France and India" (Address by Pope John Paul II at the beatification of Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified in 1983).

Going further:

Thoughts of Blessed Mary of Jesus Crucified (Mariam Baouardy), Discalced Carmelite Nun, Carmel of Bethlehem, 1846-1878, by St. Mary of Jesus Crucified, D. Buzy, January 1, 1997 by Carmel of Bethlehem

More information:

• Mariam the Little Arab, Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified (1846 - 1878) by Amedee Brunot, The Carmel of Maria Regina (January 1, 1984)

• Article Saint Mariam Bouardy, the Little Arab and Lily of Palestine, Extraordinary Mystic, Stigmatic and Victim Soul (1846-1878)
• Carmelite Sisters of Ireland's website page on Saint Mary of Jesus Crucified

• Carmel of the Holy Child Jesus Bethlehem website page St. Mary of Jesus Crucified