She is the only saint I have ever heard of with so many names. Perhaps it’s because she was a Greek-Catholic who grew up in Arabic-speaking Palestine in the 19th century, almost got married-off in Egypt and later joined a French Carmel but took her final vows in India. This little Palestinian from the 19th century eventually got canonized and is now known as St. Mariam Baouardy and St. Mariam of Jesus Crucified (her religious name) and The Lily of Palestine (her devotional name.)
As you probably know by now, I spent July 2025 living with Eastern Catholics in the Old City Jerusalem. (See the above picture of my balcony at night.) I consecrated this entire trip to my new favorite saint, the Lily of Palestine.
St. Mariam of Jesus Crucified’s life was absolutely extraordinary, especially for a person trying to live a boring life. At the age of 12, a Muslim teenager slit her throat for not marrying her. She actually died.. but Mary (the Mother of God) resuscitated her with a heavenly-soup literally in heaven. Decades later on her final death bed she was heard whispering in broken French, “She made me some soup! Oh, such good soup…She promised me that at my last hour, she will give me a little spoonful of it.”
I highly encourage you to read her long-ish life story here at Mystics of the Church. She had the stigmata to such an extent that she lived out Christ’s own Passion during Holy Week. That Mystics website explains: “Holy Week was frightful. Every part of her was bleeding: head, heart, hands and feet. During the course of her life she came to relive and act out certain scenes of the passion. She became the crucified spouse of a crucified God! Identified with her Spouse to the very details of Good Friday! ‘When she was in the state, she could have been called an ‘Ecce Homo,’ declared Mother Honorine, in 1867 at the Capelette.”
Yet Sr. Mariam was so simple that she didn’t even realize she had the stigmata! She simply thought she kept getting sick. No, this was not false-humility. The above-linked website reports: “Besides being deeply grounded in humility, in her ignorance she did not realize that the stigmata was a privileged grace from God; she looked upon it as an illness and begged God and Blessed Virgin to take from her what she called ‘the wretched marks.'”
I was first told about this saint by a charismatic priest friend of mine about fifteen years ago because of her tremendous adoration of God the Holy Spirit. (He’s a good priest, to this day.) In any case, I read a bit about her at his suggestion, but moved on. Yet she chose me in the Holy Land this summer of 2025. Now I see why we all must come closer to the Holy Spirit through Mary, especially through the example and intercession of this tremendous (yet recent) saint who “renewed her vow as a victim for the Church.”
Here are some of the things St. Mariam said in ecstasy:
-“I am in God, and God is in me. I feel that all creatures, the trees, the flowers belong to God and also to me. I no longer have a will, it belongs to God. And all that is God´s is mine.
-“Only love can fill the heart of man. The just man is satisfied with love and a pinch of earth, but the wicked man, with all the pleasures, honors, riches (he can acquire), is always hungry, always thirsty. He is never satisfied.
-“Pay attention to little things. Everything is great before the Lord. The Lord does not want robbery in the sacrifice. Offer and give Him everything.
-“In heaven, the most beautiful souls are those that have sinned the most and repented. But they made use of their miseries like manure around the base of the tree.”
-“Be very charitable; when one of your eyes sees what is not right, shut it and then open the other one! Change everything into good.”
-“If you love your neighbor, it is by this that you will know if you love Jesus. Each time you look at your neighbor without seeing Jesus, you fall very low.”
Although St. Mariam of Jesus Crucified is a favorite of charismatics today due to her great love of the Holy Spirit and all the outstanding miracles attributed to her after her death, none of my online articles would (unfortunately) be complete without some heresy-hunting. Of course, in this case, I do my heresy-hunting not against this great modern saint, but with this great modern saint. Yes, the following will show that even the most tender saints before Vatican II spoke of our Catholic Faith in a way completely different from 99% of all Post-Conciliar Catholics.
The night that the Muslim was to slice her and leave her for dead in the alley (8 Sept 1858—the birthday of Our Lady) our little 12 year old Mariam had a choice to make: Accept Islam or face the teenage Muslim’s knife. Although most neo-con Catholics today would clearly admire such courage in the little martyr (or rather I should say—near martyr—as Mary brought her back from heaven to earth for another 20 years of a crucified and miraculous life in religion) her vocabulary just before he slit her throat would make modernists quite squeamish:
[The Muslim teen] introduced conversion to Islam as a remedy to [12 year old] Mariam’s problems. His words and actions focused young Mariam directly upon her Christianity. However, she soon realized the young man’s true intentions, and this caused her to draw back. She denied his advances and loudly proclaimed her faith in the Church of Jesus. “Muslim, no, never! I am a daughter of the Catholic Church, and I hope by the grace of God to persevere until death in my religion, which is the only true one.”
Indeed, only the so-called “traditionalist” Catholic today will refrain from blushing or ascribing her vocabulary to “being a child of her times” when we read about her intransigent insistence that there be only one true religion on planet earth. Even this tiny little Eastern Catholic martyr of the 19th century proclaimed what Western modernists today will never say out loud:
“Muslim, no, never! I am a daughter of the Catholic Church, and I hope by the grace of God to persevere until death in my religion, which is the only true one.”
Saint Mariam of Palestine, ora pro nobis!