"I carry within me three lives, all very strong: family life with its multiple sorrows of a thousand kinds, that is, the life of a mother; the life of the Works of the Cross with all its sorrows and weight, which at times crushes me until I have no strength left; and the life of the spirit or interior life, which is the heaviest of all, with its highs and lows, its tempests and struggles, its light and darkness. Blessed be God for everything!" — Blessed ConcepciΓ³n Cabrera de Armida
The Saint Nobody Saw Writing
After her death in 1937, the investigators preparing her beatification cause interviewed her surviving children. One of them, asked whether his mother had been a saint, said: he didn't know about that, but she had been a very good mother. And a very good cook.
It is the most revealing biographical detail in the entire dossier. Not the sixty-six handwritten diary volumes. Not the 60,000 pages of mystical writing. Not the five religious apostolates she founded, or the private audience with Pope Pius X, or the mystical grace she received on the Feast of the Annunciation in 1906 that took her the rest of her life to begin to understand. What the child remembered — one of the children of a woman who wrote, in total, as much as Saint Thomas Aquinas — was that his mother had been good to him and had fed him well.
This is not incidental. It is the theological claim ConcepciΓ³n Cabrera de Armida — known across Mexico and now across the world simply as Conchita — makes by the totality of her life: that the mystical life and the domestic life are not two competing realities between which a woman must choose, but a single integrated vocation, lived simultaneously, in the same kitchen, at the same writing desk, in the same body. She raised nine children, buried four of them in childhood, nursed a husband through a long illness and buried him too, continued raising the children alone through the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War, founded five religious apostolates while remaining a laywoman, produced a body of mystical writing comparable in sheer volume to the greatest theologian of the medieval Church, and died in her children's arms at seventy-five — dying canonically as a religious, by special indulgence of the Pope, without ever having left her family.
Her children hardly ever saw her writing. But the writing was there: sixty-six notebooks, forty-six published books, two hundred volumes submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints when her canonization process opened in 1959. It was done between the meals, between the children, between the prayers, between the political crises, between the grief. It was done, God told her, because that was her mission: to ask for a long life of suffering and to write a great deal.
She was beatified in 2019 as the first Mexican laywoman to receive that recognition. She is one of the great mystics of the twentieth century, and she made her children's breakfast.
Born on the Immaculate Conception — San Luis PotosΓ, December 8, 1862
The date of Conchita's birth was, in a Catholic family in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, itself a kind of announcement. December 8 is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception — the feast that celebrates Mary conceived without sin, the feast that in Mexican Catholicism, still saturated with the aftermath of the Guadalupe apparitions three centuries before, carried particular weight. The seventh of nine children born to Octaviano Cabrera Lacavex and Clara Arias Rivera, Conchita arrived at the midpoint of a large family in a prosperous landowning household, in a country still sorting out what it had become after independence and what it was going to become next.
San Luis PotosΓ in 1862 was a city of churches and political instability — like most of Mexico, it was in the middle of one of the convulsions that would characterize the country throughout Conchita's lifetime: the War of Reform had just ended, the French intervention was beginning, and Maximilian I was about to arrive to play emperor in a country that did not want him. The Mexico that Conchita was born into was a Mexico that would spend almost her entire life in some form of social upheaval — Reform wars, the Porfiriato, the Revolution, the Cristero War — and her spiritual life would be formed not in the stability of an established religious institution but in the turbulence of a Church under pressure.
The Cabrera family lived well. They owned a hacienda — the JesΓΊs MarΓa estate, which would later become the site of the first Cross of the Apostolate erected by Conchita's movement. Conchita grew up riding horses; she was, by her own account, a skilled horsewoman, which the sources preserve partly because her frail childhood health led her family to encourage physical activity to strengthen her. She was, by her own later recollection, not always obedient. She could be imperious and self-willed. The hagiographical sources note her disobediences with the specificity of things she herself recorded, because Conchita wrote everything down and was honest about herself in the writing.
What she also wrote down, from the earliest entries of her spiritual diary, were the supernatural experiences that had begun in childhood. She recorded the Christ Child appearing to play with her in her room. She recorded the devil appearing disguised as a grotesque creature, trying and failing to frighten her because her guardian angel would not permit it. These are the kinds of accounts that the modern reader approaches with a combination of uncertainty and theological openness — uncertain of the phenomenology, theologically aware that the tradition has always held that the extraordinary can precede the ordinary, that what the soul will be is sometimes visible in what the child already is. What the accounts establish, whatever their precise nature, is that the interior life was present and active in Conchita from the beginning, and that it was oriented, with unusual directness, toward Christ.
Her specific devotion — the organizing center of everything she would later build — was the Eucharist. She loved it from childhood with an intensity the sources describe as above the norm: not the ordinary devotion of a pious Mexican Catholic household but something more personal, more ardent, more specific. The Eucharist was, for Conchita, not a practice but a relationship — the daily encounter with the physical presence of the Christ toward whom every other element of her life was oriented. This Eucharistic center would shape her mystical life, her writings, her pedagogy as a spiritual director, and the spirituality of every congregation she founded.
At a dance — as a teenager, which is when these things happen — she met Francisco de Armida. They became engaged. Nine years later, in 1884, they were married.
Pancho and the Nine Children — Marriage as School of the Cross
Francisco de Armida — Pancho, as everyone called him — was not a saint in the canonical sense, but he was the man Conchita loved and through whom the first major movements of her spiritual formation took place. The marriage lasted seventeen years, produced nine children between 1885 and 1899, and gave Conchita the texture of daily domestic life that would prove, in retrospect, not an obstacle to her spiritual depth but its essential medium.
She was a genuine wife in the full sense: present, engaged, managing a household with the practical intelligence of a woman who had grown up on a hacienda and understood how large establishments run. She loved Pancho. Her diary records the moment of their betrothal — she was thinking of him in her room at night, she wrote, and then she thought of the Eucharist, which was her delight. The two thoughts were not sequential steps away from each other. They were simultaneous, occupying the same interior space. Her love for her husband did not compete with her love for God; it was formed within it, shaped by it, sustained by the same capacity for devotion that made the Eucharist her center.
The children arrived regularly across fifteen years of marriage. Some of them died young — four of Conchita's nine children did not survive to adulthood, which places her within the statistical normal of Mexican Catholic family life in the late nineteenth century but does nothing to diminish the individual weight of each loss. She buried children. She kept going. She wrote in the diary, on the days when a child died, with the directness of a woman who had long since decided that God's will was not something to argue with, however much it cost.
Meanwhile — and this is the structural feature of Conchita's life that makes her both extraordinary and paradigmatic — the mystical life and the institutional life were developing alongside the domestic life, simultaneously, without displacing it. In 1893, after a period of intense prayer following a retreat, she received a vision of the Cross of the Apostolate: the symbol that would become the center of the movement she was being called to build. On May 3, 1894, the first physical Cross of the Apostolate was erected at the family hacienda. On May 3, 1895, with episcopal approval, the Apostleship of the Cross was formally founded. On May 3, 1897, she co-founded the Sisters of the Cross of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
She was, during all of this, raising children, managing a household, being a wife. Her spiritual directors — she had several, all of them men, some of them bishops, who recognized in her a mystical depth that required serious theological oversight — were guiding her through experiences and graces that none of them had necessarily encountered before in a married woman with a house full of children and a hacienda to run. The direction was careful and patient. The experiences were real and accumulating. And the domestic life continued in parallel, because it was not separable from any of it.
The Widowing and the Three Lives That Remained
Francisco Armida died in 1901. Conchita was thirty-eight years old, widowed, with children — the youngest of them two years old — still at home to raise. The death was not sudden; Francisco's final illness was prolonged, and Conchita nursed him through it with the personal directness she had learned as a daughter and practiced as a wife. When he was gone, she was alone in the specific way of women with children and no husband: responsible for everything, supported by the social network of a Mexican Catholic family but ultimately the one who had to keep it all working.
She kept it working. She also continued founding things.
In 1901, the same year Francisco died, she met a French Marist priest named FΓ©lix Rougier, who would become one of her most important spiritual collaborators. Under her spiritual influence — guided and directed by her, in the specific sense that the laywoman was directing the priest rather than the conventional inverse — Rougier eventually became the founder of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit, the male congregration that Conchita's movement needed and that she could not herself found without a priest to lead it. The Missionaries of the Holy Spirit were formally established on Christmas Day, 1914.
In 1909, the Covenant of Love with the Sacred Heart of Jesus was established. In 1912, the Fraternity of Christ the Priest. The five works of the Cross — five distinct apostolates, for laypeople, for women religious, for men religious, for priests, for consecrated virgins — were accumulating around a laywoman who was simultaneously raising children alone through the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, and which made the practical running of any institution in Mexico into a daily exercise in improvisation and faith.
The Revolution's anticlerical fury was not abstract. Seminaries closed. Convents were suppressed. Priests were driven underground or fled. The Cristero War that followed the Revolution's formal end — the 1926-1929 uprising of Catholic Mexicans against the Calles government's attempt to extirpate organized religion from public life — brought the persecution into its most violent phase. Conchita was writing in Mexico City during all of it, corresponding with her spiritual directors, directing souls, producing the diary volumes that accumulated with a quietness her children could not see because she was so thoroughly present to them in the rest of her life. She was writing as much as Thomas Aquinas. Her children thought she was mainly cooking.
She described her own situation, at some point during these years, with the precision of someone reporting from inside a situation she had not chosen and could not reduce to a single register: three lives, all very strong. The family life. The institutional life of the Works of the Cross. The interior life. Three lives at once, with the interior life — the one invisible to her children, the one without external expression or institutional form — the heaviest of all. Blessed be God, she said, for everything.
The Mystical Incarnation — Feast of the Annunciation, 1906
The crowning event of Conchita's mystical life took place on March 25, 1906 — the Feast of the Annunciation, the day the Church celebrates Gabriel's message to Mary and Mary's fiat. What happened to Conchita on that day is described in the mystical tradition as the grace of the "mystical incarnation" — and it is one of the rarest and most demanding categories of mystical experience the Church's theology of prayer has ever tried to name.
The grace is understood as an analogue to the Incarnation itself: as Christ took flesh in Mary's womb at the Annunciation, so Christ took up habitation in Conchita's soul in a new and transforming way on the anniversary of that event. The comparison is precise in what it is not claiming — it is not a claim to the same order of experience as Mary's, which the tradition regards as unrepeatable and of an incomparably higher dignity. What it claims is that the same dynamic movement — God entering into the most interior space of a human person, with that person's freely given consent, to effect a transformation that bears fruit for the whole Church — was enacted in Conchita in a way that her spiritual directors, and eventually the Church, judged to be genuine.
The grace had three characteristics, as her last great spiritual director, Archbishop Luis MarΓa MartΓnez, articulated them after years of guiding her through her attempts to understand it: it was a share in the priesthood and victimhood of Jesus; it was Eucharistic; and it was Marian. All three of these dimensions were inseparable. The share in Christ's priesthood was not the ministerial priesthood of the ordained — Conchita was clear and the Church confirmed her clarity on this — but the royal priesthood of baptism, the participation of every Christian in Christ's offering of himself to the Father, elevated in Conchita's case to an intensity and a specificity that set it apart from ordinary Christian experience. The victimhood was the other face of the same thing: to share in Christ's priesthood is to share in Christ's self-offering, which is the cross. The Eucharistic dimension was the sacramental grounding of both — the Body and Blood given, the Body and Blood received, the same self-giving enacted daily in the Mass and daily in the mystical life that the Mass both expressed and sustained.
The Marian dimension is the key to understanding why Conchita, a laywoman and a mother, received a grace specifically associated with the priestly and sacrificial life of Christ. Mary was not a priest in the ministerial sense. She was the mother of the Priest, the one who bore the Victim in her body, who offered him in the Temple, who stood at the foot of the cross while he was offered. Conchita's mystical incarnation was understood as a participation in Mary's mode of priestly maternity: the laywoman who, by bearing Christ in her soul, could offer him to the Father in union with his self-offering, and who could bear him to the world in the way a mother bears a child — not by proclamation or sacramental action but by presence, by the specific gravity of a person who carries the divine within them.
This is not a small theological claim. It is also not an eccentric one. The mystical tradition of the Church has always held that the heights of union with God are available in principle to every baptized person regardless of state of life. What Conchita demonstrated, in the specificity of her experience and its extraordinary documentation, was what that availability looks like in practice in a woman who has nine children and a hacienda and three lives running simultaneously.
She spent the rest of her life — thirty-one years — trying to understand what had happened on March 25, 1906. The retreat she made in 1935, led by Archbishop MartΓnez two years before her death, was still organized around the question of the mystical incarnation, still probing its depths. It was not a question she answered. It was a question she inhabited, increasingly, as the active life was stripped away by age and the interior life revealed itself as the structure underneath all the other structures.
Rome, Pius X, and the Strange Permission — 1913
In 1913, Conchita made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Rome, organized by her spiritual director Archbishop Ibarra. In Rome, she had a private audience with Pope Saint Pius X — the pope who had famously lowered the age for First Communion and whose theological instincts ran toward the practical, the pastoral, and the careful preservation of mystical tradition against modernist erosion.
Pius X examined her writings. He found them sound. He granted permission for the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit. He also granted something more unusual: permission for Conchita to make religious vows — the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — while remaining with her family, without entering a convent, without taking a habit, without leaving her children. The canonical status this created was paradoxical and unprecedented: a laywoman living as a religious in the middle of a domestic life, the vows she had made conferring a consecration that the Church recognized as genuinely religious while leaving the exterior of her existence unchanged.
She died, on March 3, 1937, in that canonically religious state, in the arms of her children. The paradox is complete and perfectly deliberate: a woman who was canonically a religious and experientially a mother, who made religious vows while cooking for her family, who wrote as much as Thomas Aquinas while her children never saw her at it, who received one of the most advanced mystical graces the tradition can name while maintaining a household and raising nine children through a revolution.
The permission of Pius X was not a curiosity. It was the canonical acknowledgment of what Conchita's entire life was demonstrating: that the categories by which the Church organizes holiness — religious life here, lay life there; active here, contemplative there; mystical over there, domestic over here — are always provisional approximations of something the Spirit does not always choose to contain within them.
The Writing and the Silence — Sixty-Six Notebooks Nobody Saw Her Fill
God told her to ask for a long life of suffering and to write a great deal. The instruction was specific and its fulfillment was literal.
Sixty-six notebooks, written over more than forty years, constitute the Cuenta de Conciencia — the Account of Conscience, the spiritual diary she kept in obedience to her directors, beginning as a tool of spiritual accountability and developing into one of the most sustained records of interior mystical experience in the history of Catholic literature. In volume, the diary alone rivals the Summa Theologiae. Add the forty-six published books — A Mother's Letters, To My Priests, Holy Hours, Before the Altar, I Am: Eucharistic Meditations on the Gospel, Seasons of the Soul, Irresistibly Drawn to the Eucharist and many more — and the total writing, at over 60,000 handwritten pages, represents one of the most substantial bodies of mystical and theological literature produced by any woman in Catholic history.
The To My Priests is worth pausing on. Conchita addressed herself throughout her life specifically to priests — not as an authority over them, not as a teacher in the institutional sense, but as what her tradition calls a spiritual mother: someone whose prayer, suffering, and love was oriented specifically toward the sanctification of the ordained. This vocation grew directly from the mystical incarnation and its priestly dimension. If her soul bore Christ in the manner of priestly offering, then her love and prayer were directed toward the men whose vocation was to make that offering sacramentally present. She wanted holy priests with the specific intensity of someone who understood theologically why unholy priests were a particular catastrophe — not just for the Church as an institution but for the souls who needed the sacraments those priests administered.
She is called the Spiritual Mother to Priests in her tradition. It is an unusual title for a laywoman, and it rests on an unusual claim: that the holiness of the priesthood is not the exclusive concern of priests, that laypeople — mothers especially, women who understand what it is to bear and form and offer — have a specific vocation to support the sanctification of the clergy through prayer and sacrifice. This is not the feminism of institutional access. It is something older and stranger: the theology of the hidden sustaining power, the invisible maternity that holds up what it does not formally govern.
The writing sustained all of it. But her children never saw her writing. This is the detail that accumulates meaning the longer one holds it. She was writing in the interstitial spaces — early morning, late night, the hours between children and meals and apostolate correspondence and prayer — producing output of staggering quality and volume in the time most people use for rest. The writing was not separate from the life. It was the life, pressed out in ink, the three simultaneous existences — family, apostolate, interior — making contact with the page in the only moments of the day when Conchita was alone.
Revolution, Cristero War, and the Witness of Martyrs — Writing in the Wreckage
Mexico's political upheaval between 1910 and the late 1920s forms the background against which everything Conchita built must be understood. The Mexican Revolution did not arrive as a single event but as a sustained dismantling: of the old Porfirian order, of land arrangements, of social structures, and — with particular ferocity in the years that followed — of the institutional Church. The 1917 constitution was explicitly anti-clerical: it banned religious orders, prohibited public worship outside churches, stripped the Church of legal personality, forbade priests and nuns from wearing religious dress in public, and gave the state control over religious education.
The Cristero War of 1926–1929 was the violent response to these measures, when Catholic Mexicans took up arms against a government that was attempting to exterminate organized religion from public life. Priests were executed. Seminaries were forced closed. Convents were suppressed. The martyrs of the Cristero War — among them Blessed Miguel Pro, killed in 1927 — were people Conchita's world produced and that she knew of or knew personally.
She was writing through all of it. The apostolates she had founded were operating under conditions of genuine institutional peril — the Works of the Cross were organizations of Catholic life in a country whose government regarded organized Catholic life as a threat. Her correspondents included priests who were hiding, bishops who had been expelled, religious who had been forced to shed their habits. She was a laywoman in her own house, which gave her a kind of structural protection that her priest-collaborators did not have, and she used that protection by continuing to function: writing, directing, corresponding, praying, keeping the spiritual infrastructure alive through a period designed to destroy it.
The suffering she had asked God for, in obedience to what she understood as his instruction, arrived in forms she could not have imagined when she made the request. The suffering of grief — children buried, husband buried. The suffering of isolation — the mystic's interior life is, by definition, a life mostly inaccessible to others. The suffering of the apostolate — building institutions with inadequate resources in a hostile political environment, watching what she had built be threatened by forces she could not control. And the suffering that she named, in her own taxonomy, as the heaviest of all: the interior life, with its highs and lows, its tempests and its darkness.
She bore all three simultaneously. She cooked.
Archbishop MartΓnez and the Last Decade — Toward the Finish
In 1925, Archbishop Luis MarΓa MartΓnez became Conchita's spiritual director — her last, as it proved. He was forty-four years old; she was sixty-three. He was already one of the most theologically sophisticated churchmen in Mexico, on his way to becoming Archbishop of Mexico City and Primate of Mexico, a man whose own interior life was serious and who therefore understood what he was encountering in Conchita with a precision her earlier directors had not always achieved.
Under MartΓnez's direction, the final decade of Conchita's active life reached its maturation. The Works of the Cross were established; the five apostolates had their canonical form; the writing continued. The retreat of 1935 — two years before her death, when Conchita was seventy-three — was organized by MartΓnez around the mystical incarnation, the crowning grace of 1906 that she had been living inside of for twenty-nine years and was still, in her final decade, probing for depths she had not yet reached. This is not the picture of a mystic who received her grace and spent the rest of her life reporting on it. It is the picture of a mystic who received a grace so profound that twenty-nine years of sustained attention was not enough to exhaust it.
She died on March 3, 1937, in Mexico City. She died in her children's arms. She died canonically as a religious, by the indulgence of a pope who had recognized, when she came to him in 1913, that the categories available to the Church were not quite capacious enough for what she was. She was seventy-five years old. She had been a fiancΓ©e and a wife and a mother of nine and a grandmother of sixteen and a widow and a foundress of five apostolates and a mystic of the first order and, by special act of the successor of Peter, a religious who never wore a habit or left her home.
She was also a very good cook.
The Beatification and What It Claims — Guadalupe, May 4, 2019
The beatification ceremony on May 4, 2019, took place at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City — the most symbolically loaded location in the religious geography of the Americas, the site of the tilma, the apparition, the image that is to Mexican Catholicism what few images are to any other national tradition: the definitive sign that God had claimed this land and its people for himself. To beatify Conchita there was to place her explicitly within that tradition — not the European tradition of Catholic mysticism that her writings engage and sometimes equal, but the specifically Mexican tradition, the tradition of Guadalupe and popular piety and the faith of ordinary Catholic families who have maintained the Church through revolutions and suppressions and the casual violence of a state that periodically decided to eliminate them.
She was the first Mexican laywoman to be beatified. The distinction is theologically significant. She is not the first Mexican to be beatified; she is the first who was neither a martyr nor a consecrated religious in the conventional sense, who achieved recognized holiness through the ordinary states of lay life — marriage, motherhood, widowhood — while operating an interior life of extraordinary depth. What the beatification claims is that these are not two separate categories, that the kitchen and the mystical life are not in tension, that the woman who fed her children and the woman who wrote sixty-six diary volumes and the woman who received the mystical incarnation were the same woman doing the same thing.
The miracle that enabled the beatification was the healing of a young father in serious illness — a man who recovered after his family prayed at Conchita's tomb. The specificity of the miracle, as in all such cases, matters less than what it establishes: that there is an intercession at work, that the relationship between the person now beatified and the living Church continues to produce verifiable effects. Conchita, who spent her life as a spiritual mother to priests and to the world, now mothers from the other side of death.
Her patronage of mothers is the patronage of her own vocation: she lived it for three decades while simultaneously living the two other lives she carried. Her patronage of priests is the explicit claim of her mystical life and her most unusual title: the laywoman whose prayer was specifically directed toward the sanctification of the ordained, who understood the priesthood as something that lay people serve and sustain through their own offering. Her patronage of mystics among the laity is the argument of her entire existence: that the heights of the interior life are not reserved for those in religious habit, that what the Spirit does in a cloistered monastery the Spirit can do in a hacienda kitchen.
She is the patron of Mexico not because she built its institutions or shaped its politics but because she maintained its faith through the years when its faith was being actively destroyed — writing in her house while the seminaries closed, directing priests while the priests were hiding, producing the interior sustenance the Church needed during decades in which the exterior structures were being stripped away. She held the interior life alive in her sixty-six notebooks while the exterior life of Mexican Catholicism was under systematic attack. The notebooks are still there. The apostolates are still operating. The priests she mothered continued. The Church in Mexico survived.
| Born | December 8, 1862 (Feast of the Immaculate Conception), San Luis PotosΓ, Mexico |
| Died | March 3, 1937, Mexico City — natural death, age 75; died in her children's arms, canonically as a religious |
| Feast Day | March 3 |
| Order / Vocation | Laywoman; foundress of the Works of the Cross; religious by papal indulgence of Pius X |
| Beatified | May 4, 2019 — Pope Francis, Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City |
| Venerable | December 20, 1999 — Pope John Paul II |
| Body | Enshrined at the Chapel of San JosΓ© del Altillo, CoyoacΓ‘n, Mexico City |
| Patron of | mothers · widows · priests · Mexico · mystics among laypeople |
| Known as | Conchita · Spiritual Mother to Priests · First Beatified Mexican Laywoman |
| Husband | Francisco de Armida (Pancho) — died 1901 |
| Children | Nine (four died young); sixteen grandchildren |
| Canonical status at death | Religious, by special indulgence of Pope Pius X (1913), while remaining with her family |
| Key writings | A Mother's Spiritual Diary (Cuenta de Conciencia, 66 notebooks) · To My Priests · I Am: Eucharistic Meditations on the Gospel · Irresistibly Drawn to the Eucharist · Holy Hours · Seasons of the Soul · 46 published books total; 60,000+ handwritten pages |
| Foundations | Five Works of the Cross: Apostleship of the Cross (1895) · Sisters of the Cross of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1897) · Covenant of Love with the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1909) · Fraternity of Christ the Priest (1912) · Missionaries of the Holy Spirit (1914) |
| Crowning grace | Mystical incarnation, March 25, 1906 (Feast of the Annunciation) |
| Their words | "I carry within me three lives, all very strong... Blessed be God for everything!" |
Prayer
O God, who called your servant Conchita to be at once wife and mother and widow and founder and mystic, who asked her to carry three lives simultaneously and bear the heaviest of them in silence, grant us the grace to sanctify whatever state we find ourselves in, to discover that the kitchen and the chapel are not two places but one, and to trust that the writing you ask us to do will be done in the interstitial hours we think we do not have. Through Christ our Lord, whose Body she bore in her soul as Mary bore him in her womb, and who asks no one to be anything other than what he has made them. Amen.
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