Saint Dulce of the Poor, the Good Angel of Bahia

Born in Salvador de Bahia to a dentist, Maria Rita de Souza Brito Lopes Pontes, known as Irma Dulce, had a happy childhood. At the age of thirteen, the teenager was already assisting the sick people, and expressed her desire to become a nun. Through prayer and hard work, she succeeded in creating an exceptional network of solidarity, and became a figure of charity, the Brazilian "Mother Teresa". The spiritual life of the woman nicknamed "the good angel of Bahia", outstanding both in its intensity and in the variety of graces that God sent her, became known far and wide. Sister Dulce died on 13 March 1992 at the age of 77. She received a public funeral whose procession was followed by thousands of people stretching over 6 kilometers. Her canonisation process, which began in January 2000, was one of the shortest in modern history, being completed only 27 years after her death.

Bahia, Brazil / © CC0 Pexels, LEONARDO DOURADO.

Les raisons d'y croire :

It is rare to see an apostolate on behalf of the poor begin so early in a person's life: she was still in her teens when she took the initiative of caring for poor and sick people into the family kitchen, where she gave them food and comfort, making her house known as the "Saint Francis's Gate House".

The success and longevity of the charitable establishments she founded are astounding given her total lack of personal material resources. For example, Sister Dulce housed a large number of sick people in an old chicken coop next to a convent. In just five years, this became Santo Antônio Hospital, the largest hospital in Bahia - a hospital structure that would cost several hundred million euros to build today.

Similarly, the Charitable Works Foundation of Sister Dulce (Portuguese acronym OSID: Obras Sociais Irmã Dulce) is now a large complex, with 40,000 square metres of floor space and 954 beds in around twenty medical specialities. Every day, 2,000 people are admitted. It performs 12,000 surgical procedures a year, in addition to 18,000 hospital admissions.

St. Francis Workers' Union, St. Anthony School for workers and their families, Saint Antonio Hospital, CESA, a school for the poor in Simões Filho, a social hospice, the Saint Antonio Inn, the Institute of the Daughters of Mary, Servants of the Poor. Her all-round activity extraordinary given the fact that, throughout her life, Sister Dulce suffered from respiratory problems that sometimes forced her to slow down her work, and eventually took her life.

Sister Dulce herself was convinced that it was God who gave her what she needed to be able to undertake and succeed in such large-scale endeavors - one of the largest charity network in Brazil to date. Food, clothing, medical care, schooling, catechism classes: hundreds of thousands of people benefited from her apostolate, not only in Bahia and the surrounding region, but throughout the country.

The miracles used in her canonisation process speak for themselves: After giving birth to her second child in 2003, Claudia Cristina dos Santos suffered a heavy hemorrhage for 18 hours, and had three surgeries to try and stop the bleeding. Her obstetrician told her that only "divine help" could save her. When the priest organised a prayer chain asking for Sister Dulce's intercession and gave Claudia a relic of the blessed Sister, she was healed instantly. Sixteen doctors testified to the scientific inexplicability of her sudden recovery. In 2014, Mauricio, who had been blind for fourteen years (optic nerves destroyed), put an image of Blessed Dulce over his eyes, praying to Jesus and Sister Dulce to help him, and he recovered his sight a few hours later.

Sister Dulce's body, placed in a glass shrine in the Church of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God in Bahia, is still completely incorrupt eighteen years after her death.

Neither the Church nor the Brazilian government ever expressed the slightest reservations about her charitable works, quite the contrary. In 1988, Sister Dulce was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Brazilian President José Sarney and Queen Silvia of Sweden. The Church showed admiration and recognition for her person and works: Pope John Paul II visited her twice (1980 and 1991), and so did Mother Teresa (1979).

Synthèse :

Maria Rita Lopes Pontes was born on 26 May 1914 into a family of five children in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Her father, a dentist by trade, was a practicing Catholic committed to charitable works, who had a strong influence on his daughter. Rita lost her mother when she was six. She was a happy, strong-willed, and intelligent child, attentive to everything and everyone. She liked to go to Mass with her father and prayed in her room whenever she could. The warmth of her home, the kindness of her father and the good relationships she had with her teachers at school helped Rita grow up with a strong sense of happiness and confidence. Her psychological balance undoubtedly helped her devise and carry out outstanding charity works.

In 1927, at the age of 13, when most teenagers think of pursuing a worldy education, she began thinking seriously about giving her life to Christ as a consecrated religious, to serve Jesus in the person of the poor. It was at this time that she took her first initiative to help the underprivileged: as she regularly accompanied her father to assist the needed in very poor neighbourhoods, she had the idea of opening the family kitchen to the most desperate. For two years, men, women and children from the favelas gathered there to receive her help. After celebrating her fifteenth birthday, she sensed that God was calling her to something different and greater. She began to express her desire to become a nun. Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus accompanied her from that moment on and never left her side.

With her father's consent (she was still a minor), she knocked on the door of the convent at Desterro, but was not admitted because of her young age. It was only a postponement. If the Lord willed it, so it would be. She continued her studies with flying colours and obtained diplomas that enabled her to become a teacher. She managed to be in school, run her charity work and live a life of deep prayer at the same time.

By then she had turned 18: she was now of age, and her project to become a nun had matured. She applied for admission to the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, an apostolic congregation founded a few years earlier in Brazil. She entered the novitiate and took the name Sister Dulce, for all eternity (15 August 1934).

She entered the convent on 8 February 1933, and only three years later founded the first workers' movement in Salvador de Bahia, with the consent of her superiors and the episcopal authorities: the Workers' Union of Saint Francis was a kind of prototype organisation that would serve as a model for her over the years to extend charity to an increasing number of people. It was a small Franciscan-inspired structure that helped the humblest workers on a material level, but also encouraged faith, prayer and conversions among them.

The following year, together with her confessor, Father Hildebrando Kruthaup, she founded a workers' circle that brought together dozens of needy people, the homeless, school drop-outs and destitute women. In 1939, the Saint Antonio School opened its doors in a poor district of Bahia. Nuns came to teach very poor children. Sister Dulce had nothing of her own, but the school equipment was providentially donated.

At the same time, the saint continued to take in more and more destitute children. The year 1949 marked the date of the famous "chicken coop" episode: with the permission of her congregation, she gathered together around sixty sick people in an old henhouse next to a religious community in the city. This was the starting point for what was to become the largest hospital in Bahia (now covering 40,000 square metres!). A project of this scale was really carried out without any human or material resources: without any money or network, Sister Dulce set up in just a few years a hospital structure that would cost hundreds of millions of euros today. With an indestructible faith, she succeeded in convincing doctors, nurses, administrative staff and educators to join her. All the obstacles in her path eventually fell, one after the other.

In the 1960s, although she lived evangelical poverty to a heroic degrees, she began receiving public acknowledgement and honors from the people of Bahia, from Brazilians from different states, and from international personalities, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. In 1979, she met Mother Teresa. She also received the visit of Pope John Paul II twice. On the second occasion (20 October 1991), the Pope changed his schedule so that he could spend more time with her.

Sister Dulce, whose body remains incorrupt, was beatified on 22 May 2011, and Pope Francis proclaimed her a saint on 13 October 2019.

Patrick Sbalchiero

Aller plus loin :

On the website of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints: a biography, the decrees recognising the miracles and other documents relating to the canonisation of Sister Dulce Lopes Pontes (in Italian).

En savoir plus :

Vatican News article "Dulce Lopes Pontes: From serving the sick to Nobel nominee"
Article "The Good Angel of Bahia is the first Brazilian saint of our time"
Nos passos de Santa Dulce dos pobres, o anjo bom da Bahia (Portuguese Edition) by Luiz Alexandre Solano Rossi, Paulus Editora; 1st edition (November 1, 2019)