The prodigious life of Mariam Baouardy

Mariam Baouardy was born on 5 January 1846 in Abellin in Galilee. At the age of 3, orphaned by both her parents, she was left alone with her brother Paul. Her uncle takes her in in Alexandria where her family has emigrated and wants to marry her by force, when she is only 12 years old. She refuses, runs away to a former Muslim servant who asks her to convert to Islam. Faced with her indignant refusal, he gets carried away, slits her throat with a scimitar... and leaves her for dead in a dump.
She is miraculously healed through the intercession of the Virgin Mary and is placed in a family that she follows as a servant in Lebanon, then in France, where she enters the Carmelite convent in Pau. She then took part in the foundation of the Carmelite convent of Mangalore in India and in the Carmelite convent of Bethlehem, where she died at the age of 33 following a construction accident: an itinerary in conformity with the prophecy that the Blessed Virgin had traced out for her during her miraculous healing.
Beatified in 1983 by John Paul II, she was canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis. On July 4, 1875, Mariam Baouardy testifies to her love for France and Syria by making this astonishing prophecy: "There will come a time which seems far, very far in the eyes of man, but in the eyes of God it is not far, when France will also be queen... She will rule Syria... Oh! What rejoices my heart is that Syria will belong to France." The region had been under Ottoman rule for four centuries. And to think that that was from 1922 to 1946.
In this Middle East, today devastated, resounds a premonition of Sister Mariam in ecstasy, in Bethlehem, and that mothers can make their own with despair: "Seeing me as a barren land, I cried out to the Lord. I said to Him: "My land is dry and scorched, send him your dew... My lips are dry, I cannot move them to call You to my help. Lord, send your dew to this barren land, that it may live again."

In the media:
"The good Lord often chooses the smallest thing to manifest his glory. This is what happened in the case of Mariam Baouardy (1846-1878). As a young Palestinian orphan, she fled to France to escape from an uncle who wants to marry her by force. Entering the Carmelite convent in Pau, she is blessed with inestimable mystical graces (she relives the Passion, talks with Christ and the Blessed Virgin, has ecstasies, etc.). Having kept her simplicity all her life, she transmits her intuitions and revelations in a somewhat childish language. If she is severe and demanding for herself, she has a great gentleness for others. She patiently endured all the trials that Christ had in store for her, who sent her to participate in the foundation of a monastery in India, then to Bethlehem, where she died at the age of 33.
An edifying life that links France and the Near East in the person of a humble Carmelite.
Blandine Fabre, for The New Man