The Guadalajara Reporter

Local nun set to become Mexico’s second female saint

Pope Benedict XVI is to elevate Guadalajara-born nun Maria Guadalupe Anastasia García Zavala to sainthood 49 years after her death.

Madre Lupita, as she is referred to locally, was the cofounder of the Sisters of St. Margaret Mary and the Poor Congregation and the director general of the Santa Margarita Hospital in Calle Garibaldi in the Capilla de Jesus neighborhood of Guadalajara.

During an audience in the Vatican on December 20, the Pope put the final stamp on her canonization, ratifying a miracle attributed to her in 2003.  The sainthood ceremony will be scheduled sometime time next year.

She becomes Mexico’s second female saint after Maria de Natividad de Jesus Sacramentado Venegas from Zapotlanejo, Jalisco, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II in May 2001.

Born in April 1878, Madre Lupita had planned to marry but suddenly broke off her engagement to take her vows.

According to the Catholic News Agency, she realized “Jesus was calling her to love him with an undivided heart as part of the religious life, and she fully believed that she was called to do this by giving assistance to the poor and sick.”

The congregation first known as the “Handmaids of St Margaret Mary (Alacoque) and the Poor” officially began on October 13, 1901.

Madre Lupita worked as a nurse in the congregation’s small hospital, attending to the poor and needy of Guadalajara.  She was soon named its superior general and, in the words of the Catholic News Agency, led by example, demonstrating “the importance of living a genuine and joyful exterior and interior poverty.”

During the anti-clerical Cristero War of the 1920s, she hid persecuted priests and even the archbishop of Guadalajara from government troops.

When times were hard Madre Lupita would often take to the streets herself to seek donations.

She was beatified in 2003.

The miracle required for her canonization also occurred in that year when an 82-year-old woman arrived unconscious at the Santa Margarita Hospital. Doctors there diagnosed her with a brain hemorrhage and recommended for her to be taken to the IMSS Centro Medico. But before she left her children prayed for Madre Lupita’s intercession in the hospital’s chapel. The woman soon regained consciousness and made a full recovery.

During her lifetime, 11 St. Margaret Mary foundations were established in Mexico. Today, the congregation has 22 foundations in five countries: Mexico, Peru, Iceland, Greece and Italy.