Biography of Sor Sebastiana de Jesus, taken from the one written by Bishop Francisco Gainza, OP
Madre Sebastiana de Jesus Salcedo (1652 - 1692) was an yndia from Pasig. She was among the first companions of Madre Francisca del Espritu Santo as Dominican Tertiaries. It was in one of the daily visits of Madre Francisca and her sister-in-law, Madre Antonia de Jesus Esguerra to the church of Santo Domingo that they came to know Sebastiana Salcedo. Sebastiana could have transferred to Manila because the Augustinian friars who ministered in her hometown parish barely allowed native women to join their third order. The saintly women invited her to join them in their house of prayer and contemplation. Like the first Filipinas to be accepted in the Monasterio de Sta. Clara, the first monastery of nuns in the Philippines founded in 1621 by Mother Jeronima de la Asuncion, she was a ladina, who could speak and understand Tagalog and Spanish.
An acknowledged mystic, it was she who prophesied about the foundation of the beaterio near the convent of Santo Domingo. A prophecy which was fulfilled four years after her death. "She appeared to be God-sent to the community of Spanish beatas to remind them that no race has a monopoly of God's grace." Her rich spiritual life touched not only her two Spanish friends but also the Dominican friars so that in 1683 or 1684, she was vested with the holy habit of a Dominican tertiary and was given the name Sor Sebastiana de Jesus. Transcending racial lines, they formed the nucleus of the beginning of the soon to be established Dominican Beaterio de Sta. Catalina de Sena.
She died at the young age of 40 perhaps due to the many years of self-abnegation and mortification she has subjected herself with.
*The following account on the life of Madre Sebastiana de Jesus Salcedo was lifted verbatim from source. It was taken from the Acts of the Provincial Chapter of the Dominican Province of the Most Holy Rosary in 1692 as eulogy to this extra-ordinary yndia which the Most Reverend Francisco Gainza, OP included in his book "Milicia de Jesucristo: Manual de los Hermanas de la Tercera Orden de Penitencia de Santo Domingo published in 1859.
Fray Juan de Santo Domingo, OP in mentioning Madre Sebastiana in his "Breve Relacion" says "A longer story could be made, if it were my duty to do it." Since this Venerable Mother was one of the most admirable women born in the Philippines, it does not seem fair to remain satisfied with that short praise, and we think that the readers will be grateful to have a more detailed account about her.
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Mo. Sebastiana de Jesus, Mystic Beata
from Pasig (in F. Gainza) |
The account of Bishop Gainza, OP begins: "There is no difference of nations before God nor of nobility before his sight, for he created equal the one and the other and cares equally for all of them."
Although this truth is clearly set in the Holy Scriptures, there are presumptuous people, who, looking down on the lowliness of these natives and of their thoughts and and expression, dare to say and maintain that they are incapable of heroic virtue and of high contemplation. For such people measure the value of nature without considering the power of divine grace, which makes sons of Abraham out of stones, and from rubbish, he raises the poor into the highest honor.
It was on this reflection that the history of the Province of the Most Holy Rosary wanted to base the narrative of the angelic life, marvelous penance, and the total beauty of the sublime virtues of a simple native woman, Tertiary of Our Order, honor and glory of the Tagalog people and ornament of the Philippine Islands. In her, the Lord made such great things to show the power of His grace and to manifest His divine omnipotence, that if those who directed and treated her soul had written her life and virtues, they would have greatly enhanced the faith in this land, and would have given great lustre to the Church of God.
For just in the few things said about her in the Acts of the Intermediate Chapter of the Province in the year 1692, we can trace such high spiritual perfection, that her virtue can vie with the virtues of the saintly woman of first rank. Her name was Sebastiana de Jesus and her native place, the town of Pasig.
The Lord prepared this fortunate virgin with the blessings of His grace. This explains that even before she could distinguish the good from the evil, and before she had a director or teacher in the difficult ways of the spirit, she made a total renunciation of all the vanities of the world and a complete consecration of her body and senses to the service of her celestial spouse, whom she chose in the dawn of her infancy, to whom, since then, she consecrated her virginity, which she preserved intact till her death, just as she preserved the baptismal grace which she did not lose in all her life.
In the life of a simple native girl, born in a provincial town, such wonderful beginnings would have seemed incredible, had not the Chronicle of the Dominican Order underlined in that the girl practiced all these things from her infancy, even before she had a spiritual father or knew anything about guidance of the souls: "because the Holy Spirit who guided her led all her actions and raised her affections to great things."
Only in this way can we understand the extraordinary fastings she made when she was only seven years of age, because it seemed impossible for a human body to be sustained with such small quantity. When the physicians in Manila were consulted they could not find a reasonable explanation.
Her abstinence reached such high degree that in the last fifteen years of her life she could hardly swallow any kind of food, living on the daily Holy Communion, which not only strengthened her soul but also visibly envigorated her body, this being so notable that if some day she was not permitted to receive the Communion, her weakness was such that she seemed to be undergoing the agonies of death.
But let no one think that because she received Communion so frequently she did it out of routine and without the preparation that is required for that Bread of the Angels; on the contrary, the fervor with which she prepared her soul was such, and the volcano of her chaste heart so burning that, as the historian of the Province of the Holy Rosary says, "when she received this sacrament the ardor in her heart was even noticed by the priest in the earnestness that her mouth breathed, which seem like a howler emitting flames, fire and ardors."
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| Old Santo Domingo Church in Intramuros |
The mortifications of Sebastiana were not limited to this astonishing fasting. The frequent self-scourgings and the haircloth which she wore attached to the flesh were all the more admirable because of the weakness of her fatigued body and the purity of her soul. The rest she took was rather a torture. Aside from the privations common in the country for the lower class, Sebastiana deviced means to sleep little and with the least comfort, spending four or five hours of the night on her knees, absorbed in the most profound and high contemplation.
And as if such austere penances were not enough to quench her insatiable thirst for suffering, she offered herself to God as victim on whom He could unload the punishments deserved by the offenses committed in the Islands. With sincere humility she attributed to her defects all the public and private calamities that came to her knowledge. And she wished to satisfy the angered Justice of the Spouse, who was so pleased with those impulses of burning love that "he gave her an endless cross all her life, filling her with sorrows and infirmities, with unremitting fever and with such heavy pressure in the chest that she could hardly breathe and she seemed to be giving up her soul at every moment."
And if the sufferings of her body were great, the afflictions of her soul were greater: the agonizing aridities, the lack of all consolation, the dreadful darknesses, the apparent abandonment of the Beloved; in a word, the terrible trials with which the jealous Spouse of the Virgins knows how to purify the fidelity of the privileged souls whom He wants to raise to a sublime perfection. And "in spite of so much suffering - says the historian of the Province, she never tired of pains and trials and she always longed to suffer more for the honor and glory of God and for the good of others."
All these exterior penances were accompanied by the interior virtues. Her humility was so profound that she emptied herself in the presence of God, conceiving a most vivid horror of her lightest faults, and confessing them with a torrent of tears. Her virtues, her prophecies and even her miraculous cures had won for her fame among all classes of society; and the veneration that all people had for her, instead of making her proud, confused her more and more, and forced her to shun praises, thinking of herself as the most ungrateful sinner.
Her obedience was so scrupulous that she followed blindly the orders of all her superiors. Her never ending charity brought her to visit the prisons, the hospitals, the sick, wherever there were tears to wipe away, misfortunes to remedy and afflictions to console. She made truly prodigious cures, applying to all kinds of sickness and persons the same medicine, whose main efficacy were the merits of Mother Sebastiana. Those having recourse to her were not only the sick but also those who where afflicted, and she left all of them consoled with her holy words and exhortations which possessed such virtue and spiritual efficacy that no person who went to her, went away without feeling some interior repentance and impulse of devotion.
Finally, the Lord took her through all the stages of perfection even up to the intimate union, consoling her with celestial apparitions, and communicating to her the knowledge of many things, whose realization came to happen exactly, specially the time, manner and form of the foundation of the Beaterio de Santa Catalina, even the number of Beatas it would have, the street and place it would occupy. She did not have the pleasure of seeing it, but that did not impede the fulfillment of her prophecies in their smallest details.
Her precious death happened on March 20, 1692, at the age of forty. The Lord wanted to reward the humility of Sebastiana, because in spite of being a simple native, "when the news of her death was known, the whole city was moved, and all its citizens, the low and the high, the nobles and the plebeians, concurred to venerate her saintly remains which wee conserved so flexible and smooth, and so free from corruption of bad odor that it seemed to be alive." Her body was taken to the church and the funeral rites were done with a solemnity not customary for simple native women, but well deserved by her for her heroic virtues. Those virtues were exalted in funeral eulogy "more devout than scholarly, more full of tears than of rhetorical phrases."
Finally, "such was the sorrow and devotion of the attendants that ecclesiastics as well as lay people, shed abundant tears. All of them wondered at the extraordinary effects caused by this event, which moved even the irreligious and the indifferent by just looking at that cadaver that exuded the odor of sanctity."
Source:
Juan de Sto. Domingo, OP. (1711). "Breve Relacion..." "The Beaterio de Santa Catalina: The Cradle Years of the Dominican Sisters in the Philippines, 4th ed. Translated into English by a team of Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena.
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