Maria de Agreda

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Maria Fernandez Coronel, Abbess of Agreda or, known in religion as Sor (Sister) Maria de Jesus (1602–1665), also known as the Blue Nun, was the daughter of Don Francisco Coronel and his wife Catalina de Arana. She was born at Agreda, on the borders of Navarre and Aragon, on 2 April 1602. All her family were powerfully influenced by the ecstatic piety of Spain in that age.

[edit] Life

Her biographer, Samaniego, records that even as an infant in arms she was filled with divine knowledge. Her piously accounted by extreme humility. From childhood she was favored by ecstasies and visions. When she was fifteen the whole family entered the Catholic religion. The father, now an old man, and the two sons entered the Franciscan house of San Antonio de Nalda. Maria, her mother and sister established a Franciscan nunnery in the family house at Agreda, which, when Maria's reputation had extended, was replaced by the existing building. She began it with one hundred réis (one pound sterling) lent her by a devotee, and it was completed in fourteen years by voluntary gifts. Much against her own wish, we are told, she was appointed abbess at the age of twenty-five.

In 1668, four years after her death, the Franciscans published a story that at the age of twenty-two she had been miraculously conveyed to Mexico, to convert a native people, and had made five hundred journeys through the air for that purpose in one year. Though the rule required the abbess to be changed every three years, Maria remained the effective ruler of Agreda until her death.

The Virgin Mary was declared abbess, and Maria acted as her locum tenens. In her later years she inclined to the "internal prayer," and neglect of the outward offices of the church, which was usual with the alumbrados or Quietists. The Inquisition took notice of her, but she was not proceeded against with severity. Maria's importance in religion and Spanish history is based on two grounds. In the earlier part of her life, while the Franciscan, Francisco Andres de la Torre, was her confessor, she wrote an Introduction to the History of the Most Blessed Virgin. It was destroyed by the direction of another confessor. Later on, by the order of her superiors, and under the guidance of her Franciscan confessor, Andres de Fuen Mayor, she wrote The Mystic City of God (1670), a life of the Virgin Mary ostensibly based on divine revelations granted to Maria.

The Mystical City of God attracted considerable controversy after Croset, a French Recollect friar, translated and published the first part of her visions in 1690. It had already been condemned, and the Inquisition and Bl Pope Innocent XI had it placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1681, ostensibly for its "excessive" Marian devotion and doctrinal errors related to the Immaculate Conception, as well as accusations of scatological language. King Charles II of England and Philip IV of Spain lobbied Pope Alexander VIII on her behalf, but to no avail.

However, due to prompting from her Spanish admirers, the Vatican re-examined the case in 1729, under Pope Benedict XIII. After reassessment by the Universities of Salamanca, Alcala, Toulouse and Louvain, Pope Benedict XIV ordered that the ban should be lifted in 1748.

[edit] External links

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