Page 296 - Perú indígena y virreinal

presided over by Fray Alonso Velásquez, one of her Dominican confessors from the city. According to the testimony of her Jesuit confessor, Diego Martinez, Rosa had long worn a Franciscan habit, and still continued to do so, wearing it under the white habit of the Order Of Saint Catherine until the day she died (MESS, Proceso Ordinario 1617–1618, folio 65).
The admirable mortifications (voluntary humiliations) and marathon fasts that they subjected themselves to, as well as the techniques of contemplation and religious devotion that Rosa showed them allowed them to dig deep into the intellectual reserves that fed their mystic thinking and sustained their penitential way of life. Her vision of the natural world as the living sanctuary of God, full of signs and symbols that gave an insight into the creator’s mind was inspired by late medieval sacramental or mystic naturalism that had emerged in 16th Century Spain with the works of the Franciscan monk, Francisco de Osuna and the Dominican, Fray Luis de Granada (1504–1588), among others. The latter’s writings served as a permanent spiritual guide to Saint Rosa, and in Peru their lay use was so widespread that in 1607 a compendium was translated to Quechua, the language of the Incas (Meléndez 1681, t.2, 494).
Such was Rosa’s burning desire to imitate the life of Saint Catherine of Sienna that at the age of five she took the vow of perpetual virginity whilst at the age of twelve she cut off all her hair. Years later, whilst still living with her parents, she suffered the same ill treatment as the Italian saint when she rejected the potential suitors that that her parents had put forward as possible husbands. In penitence, both women imitated Christ by putting on crowns of thorns, as well as seeking to exile themselves from the world as the Saints of the Desert had done. From the Dominican mystic Saint Enrique Susón (1295–1366), Rosa acquired the custom of wearing a thick iron chain around her waist, attached with a heavy padlock. Saint Francis of Assisi was her inspiration when it came to choosing a bed (upon which she only slept for two hours daily): a number of rough, knotted tree trunks, bound together with coarse rope, symbolising the bed of our Lord Jesus Christ on the Tree of the Cross. Her rigorous fasting, which followed the recommendations laid down by Gregorio López (1542–1596), the first anchorite of the Americas, and who died in Nueva España, famous for his commentaries on the Apocalypse (Hansen 1929,80–81).
The similarity between the nuptial mysticism of Saint Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582) and that of Saint Rosa is no coincidence. In 1614, when Dr. Juan del Castillo (d.1636), from the village of Salarrubias near Toledo, and lay doctor of the Spanish Inquisition in Lima, submitted the girl to an exam of conscience in order to evaluate the true nature of the dark night of her soul and her religious visions, discovered that from a very early age she had been able to attain a contemplative state superior to that of many learned Ecclesiastical doctors, that of the union of her soul with God. Satillo’s reports were decisive in ensuring that first an Ordinary Process (1617–1618) and later an Apostolic Process (1630–1632) were opened, resulting in her beatification and canonisation. What is not generally known is that in 1624 Dr. Castillo was found to be writing two studies on Rosa’s mysticism that were censured and banned by the Holy Office of the Inquisition; one a commentary on the Teresian Moradas, a branch of mystic theology that Doctor Castillo used to interrogate Rosa concerning the stages of her inner perfection, the second, a manuscript of his own revelations. Fray Luis de Bilbao, one of the inquisitions “qualifiers” or judges had been Rosa’s confessor, and, alleging health problems, managed to exculpate Del Castillo, in spite of the fact that his writings—written while Rosa was still alive—repeated many of the doctrinal errors of the Spanish alumbrados (“enlightened ones”), a heresy comparable with that of the medieval defenders of the Free Spirit (Mújica Pinilla 2001, cap. 3).
The situation became more complicated when it became clear that, after the death of the future saint in 1617 there was a veritable outbreak of women having visions, many of them lay sisters, close friends of both Rosa and Dr. Castillo. These clairvoyants were likewise accused of alumbradismo—“enlightenment”—in two separate Inquisitional processes (Millar Corvacho 2000, 277–305). The burden of doubt fell once more upon Saint Rosa, and around the year 1624, Lima’s inquisidor of Basque origin, Andrés Juan Gaitán (active between 1611–1651) ordered that her Convent of Saint Domingo as well as her parents home be searched and all “papers” (it is not known if this refers to her notes, diaries or manuscripts), letters and details of her habits and practices be taken away. In order to demonstrate his power over the local clergy, Gaitán even went so far as to remove the saint’s body from the Church of Saint Domingo, where some years earlier in
1619, the Archbishop of Lima himself, Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero, had placed it, in a niche to the right of the altar where a portrait of the dead Saint Rosa was worshipped. The painting, by the Italian mannerist, was to become the model for all subsequent depictions of Rosa. If truth be told, neither Juan del Castillo, nor the “visionary” lay sisters could be said to be “enlightened”. None of them ever fell prey to sectarian supernaturalism nor denied the mediatory or real efficacy of the sacraments, and were therefore reconciled with the church in an Auto de Fe, held on the 21st of December 1625, in Lima’s Plaza Mayor.
What could have proved a real threat was the upsurge of lay feminine spirituality, prone to supernatural visions and revelations and who preached a prophetic discourse promoting some religious orders above others and highlighting the role of Creoles (in its strict sense of “Latin Americans of European extraction”), Mulattos and Indians in the Christian drama of salvation. Saint Rosa’s own visions had a powerful political message. It was no accident that on Palm Sunday, 1617, Rosa celebrated one of her mystic betrothals with the Christ Child in the Arms of the Virgin of the Rosary, the patron saint of King Felipe II, who had earlier arrived in Cusco in order to ensure the military victory of the Spanish army over the Incas. This spiritual matrimony, conducted in front of a wooden carving which proceeded to “miraculously” come to life, signified the unconditional alliance of Creoles with Spanish Monarchy in the Indies and in Peru particularly, represented the triumph of Counter- Reformist theology that saw religious images as aids to contemplation and a visual support with which to understand better the sermons. (Mújica 2002, 219–313)
In 1615, when Dutch Calvinist Pirates sailed into port at Callao, threatening to sack Lima’s churches, Saint Rosa reportedly ran to the church of Santo Domingo, threw herself on the altar, and promised to fight and die for the Holy Sacrament. This unconditional defense of the Sacred Form—the messianic symbol of the Spanish House of Austria— allowed the Viceroyalty’s artists to portray Rosa, monstrance in hand, alongside the king, who defended the “Cult of the Eucharist”, sword held aloft, from Arab infidels. This was a political allegory, exalting the strategic alliances between Spain and her overseas kingdoms in order to combat the double threat of Protestantism and Islam. Banned from preaching for being a woman, Rosa adopted an orphan child one year before she died, in order that he might be a missionary in the Andes. Nevertheless, she never stopped drawing attention to the maltreatment handed out to the indigenous population. Her strange visions of the devil in the form of a mastiff with whom she fought to the death bring to mind the dogs used by the Spanish during the conquest of Peru as a weapon used to hunt down Indians or drag confessions out of them once they had been taken prisoner (Busto Duthurburu 1978, 479–481). With this vision; Rosa transformed her own body into a metaphor of the suffering Indian, a human votive offering.
Another of her famous visions had more subtle and complex political and social overtones. On one occasion, Christ appeared to Rosa in the figure of a master stonemason, who led her to some work he was overseeing. The hard labour, redolent of the mine work carried out by Indian slaves, was being done by beautiful maidens in fine clothes, carving marble that they softened with their tears. The origin of this vision probably comes from the case of the mineworker that her father, Gaspar Flores, administered to in Quives, a village in the mountains above Lima to where Rosa’s family had moved around the year 1597. One single visit to this place had been enough to convert this worker into a triumphalist Creole metaphor—the hard marble being worked by the lay wives (Rosa and her followers) of the Christ-Mason representing the indigenous faithful, that once “polished” would be ready to build the New Church, prophetic and, above all, American. Some Creole chroniclers, such as the Augustine monk Ramos Gavilán, used similar analogies to compare the Latin American church to a quarry full of silver and precious stones that had grown under the earths surface thanks to the beneficial rays of the Sun of Justice (Ramos Gavilán 1988, 291). In the 18th Century, an anonymous manuscript known as the Cry of the Indian Christians in the Peruvian Americas (Planctus indorum christianorum in America peruntina; c 1750), directed at Pope Benedict XIV, described the indigenous and mixed-race priesthood as a part of a mistreated, suffering people, who, alienated from the sacramental life of the church, threatened to rise up and throw of the yoke of the subjection to the Spanish crown if it did not recognise that from
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