An Arab village in the Holy Land, a poor but deeply faithful married couple, and a pilgrimage to Bethlehem: this is the setting in which the “flower of Galilee,” Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified, known in the world as Mariam Baouardy, blossomed.
The extraordinary life of this Carmelite nun, born in 1846 in Abellin, not far from Nazareth, is closely linked to the Virgin Mary, to whom she was consecrated. Her parents, who had previously lost 12 children one after another, made a vow and went on foot on a pilgrimage to the Grotto of the Nativity to ask for the gift of a daughter; in thanksgiving, they offered the Mother of God the equivalent of the child's weight in wax.
From childhood, Mariam manifested particular gifts of grace, but she also suffered trials and tribulations of every kind; orphaned at the age of three, she later went to work as a domestic servant, preferring poorer families, for whom she even begged for alms; she was suspected of theft and ended up in prison. At 17, she experienced her first ecstasy.
Her entry into Carmel, in Pau, France, at the age of 21, was preceded by the years she spent as a daughter of St. Joseph: for 2 years, she was a postulant among the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition in Marseille.
She made her vow of virginity at the age of 13. When she was proposed as a bride to an Egyptian, she cut her hair as a sign of consecration, provoking her uncle's fury, which led him to humiliate her and treat her like a servant.
Shortly afterward, Mariam came close to death: in response to a Turk who wanted to convince her to convert to Islam, she proclaimed herself a daughter of the Catholic Church.
That is why the Muslim servant slit her throat. It was the “wedding of blood,” on September 8, 1859. As evidence of what happened, she was left with a permanently hoarse voice and a 10-centimeter scar on her neck, and it was confirmed that she was even missing some rings of her trachea. As a renowned doctor from Marseille, though an atheist, observed, “There must have been a God, because she could not have survived in those conditions without a miracle.”
In her intense and tormented life, she traveled from the paths of Galilee to Alexandria, Beirut, France, and finally Mangalore in India, where she became the first Carmelite to make her profession, at the age of 24, in 1871. She then returned to Pau, a few kilometers from Lourdes; from there, in 1875, she left for her Holy Land.
Because of her childlike appearance, the other sisters called her “the little Arab,” but she defined herself as “little nothing.” It was she herself - who barely spoke French and certainly knew nothing about architecture - who described the design and directed the construction work for the monastery that was to be built in Bethlehem.
Despite the many graces she received, she always remained obedient to her superiors, “obedience unto the miracle,” even after death: this was proof that everything came from God. In her simplicity, she called the stigmata and the manifestations of the Passion, which she experienced in her body, “my illness.”
But the passion she experienced was better understood after her death, which occurred on August 26, 1878, from gangrene caused by a fall while she was carrying water to the workers. She died amid unspeakable pain in the monastery under construction on the hill of King David. When her heart was removed, the scar of a deep, longstanding wound was found. Her heart was “transverberated,” like that of other saints, including her mother, S. Teresa of Ávila.
