And so, I maneuver into position—knees on bench, hands clasped, head bowed, eyes shut, body still—and dip into memory. I have just recovered an old desert song when Sister Maximina walks over with a photo album. She knows I’m here to ask about Mother Julia, and she can hardly wait to begin.
JULIA NAVARRETE GUERRERO was lured by the Lord when she was fifteen years old. Growing up the only daughter among six brothers in Oaxaca, Mexico, at the end of the nineteenth century, she’d already been schooled in submission, but a Jesuit priest taught her the importance of being penitent, too. “I prayed with a profound quiet of spirit and abundant tears and immense desires to suffer,” she explains in her autobiography, My Journey. To deepen her practice, she began slipping bitter aloes into her food, depriving herself of sweets, and—while praying three creeds—suspending herself from nails so that she hung in the form of a cross. “Coming down,” she writes, “I would feel a general swoon that I believed was pleasing to Our Lord.”
Eventually a band was slipped on her fourth finger, a golden ring that declared in fine script on its inner lip Amo a mi solo Cristo. And she did. Enough to decline a flesh-and-blood man who asked her to be his bride. Enough to leave her family behind and join a nunnery. Enough to take a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience so she could wholly live for him. For Julia was enraptured with Christ, not only beseeching his grace throughout the day but also rising multiple times in the night, her rosary wound between her fingers. Her devotion caught the attention of a priest looking to establish a new congregation of women, and at age twenty-two, Julia was asked to lead it. This unleashed a torrent of jealousy from the other nuns, but no matter: She was now Mother Julia, Superior General, Julia de las Espinas del Sagrado Corazón. She marked the transition by carving a monogram of Jesus upon her breast and burning it with a hot piece of iron. “In this way I was marked forever as belonging totally to Jesus,” she writes. “The ardor of the spirit exceeded the pain of the flesh.”
At the height of the Mexican Revolution, Mother Julia hustled her nuns across the international borderline and settled into a one-room house in Kingsville. She had no money for a mission, not a penny cut in half, yet within weeks she transformed the house into a school and enrolled a flock of students. She taught the neighborhood children in the afternoon and ministered to the neighborhood adults in the evening and embroidered handkerchiefs throughout the night to sell to the neighborhood ladies the following morning. Mother Julia purportedly worked so hard she forgot to eat and even to drink, but she never failed to pray. No, she prayed until she felt invaded, until “He took full possession” of her, whereupon she fainted in bliss.
After establishing her mission in South Texas, Mother Julia continued on, ultimately opening forty-five congregations of the Missionary Daughters of the Most Pure Virgin Mary in Mexico and the United States. And ever since dying in 1974, at the age of ninety-three, she has apparently worked even harder than before. People say she resuscitated a little girl who drowned. Woke a stuntman who split open his head in a moto crash. She mended marriages and healed the ailing and otherwise sent the celestial equivalent of smoke signals from above.
This is why southern Texans and northern Mexicans pray to Mother Julia to this day, why they sink to their knees and plead for intercessions, why mothers tuck her prayer card into the billfolds inside their purses, why truckers paste her photograph inside their big rigs. And it is why Sister Maximina has dedicated her life to spreading word of this woman’s virtue. She wants the Vatican to canonize Mother Julia so that she’ll officially be deified as a saint.
JOINING ME IN THE PEW, Sister Maximina opens the photo album. Its images are shot in color film but capture a black-and-white world of habits and bedsheets. Mother Julia is the golden raisin in the middle. Flipping the pages, Sister Maximina narrates a bit of her own story. How she was the youngest of fourteen children and studied at school under the same order of sisters she serves today. How she “fought the call” to become a nun herself because she couldn’t bear to leave her family. How finally, at age twenty-five, while working at a drugstore in Taft, she surrendered to God’s lure.
A decade into her own life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Sister Maximina learned that Mother Julia had taken to her bed and was unlikely to rise again. A clutch of nuns was caring for her in Mexico but needed younger hands. Whenever anyone asked why she hadn’t volunteered her services, she blamed her studies. The truth, though, was she didn’t want to witness Mother Julia’s suffering.
“But then a sister said, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to say I was there when Mother Julia needed me?’ And wow, mija, that was a dagger to my heart.”
Late one night, two of Sister Maximina’s seven older brothers drove her to Toluca, Mexico, for her new assignment. She prayed the entire way. By the time she arrived, Mother Julia was five months from death. Among her ailments was poor circulation. A massive sore had formed at the base of her spine. Wounds rippled across her back and legs. When she moved, she oozed, yet her smile remained beatific.
The sisters used only traditional medicines on Mother Julia, herbs brought over in paper bags by the indigenous people of Huasteca. They picked flowers from the garden, soaked them in a basin, and bathed her with fragrant water each day. Sister Maximina’s duty was to dip gauze in medicinal extract and wrap Mother Julia’s wounds. She smiles as she recounts this for me, then thrusts up her palms. “These hands have held a saint, okay?”
But one terrible morning, hours before dawn, the end seemed near. The sisters panicked. Forgoing traditional treatment, they summoned a white-coat doctor. After a brief examination, he started assembling an IV.
“He made an incision in her arm and, excuse the word, but he was such a brute, as he was trying to get in the IV, a little piece of her flesh came out and he didn’t even notice!” Sister Maximina stamps the floor with her Reebok. “Fortunately I was there, and I kept it. That man just didn’t know who he was treating.”
Flesh wasn’t all she saved that morning. She also fished Mother Julia’s catheter out of the trash.
“Mira,” she says, removing the crucifix tucked inside her blouse. Taped to the back of the black lacquered wood is a sliver of plastic. “Do you see what’s there, mija, inside that catheter?”
Staring closely, I make out a tiny stain within.
“Blood!” she crows. “Mother Julia’s blood.”
She unzips a Pyrex Portables bag and removes a wooden jewelry box. This belonged to Mother Julia too, she says, turning its lock with a tiny silver key. Two pairs of surgical scissors are taped beneath its lid; bundles of soiled gauze cover its contents. She removes a golden locket from a gift box and opens it. Inside are a miniature photograph of Mother Julia and a slice of her flesh. I clasp it in my hands as Sister Maximina rummages through the Pyrex Portables bag.
“Where are you where are you where are you,” she murmurs. “Here, here. Mi-ra.”
She opens a piece of paper that has been folded many times, then allows me to peek at its contents. It looks like expired spice. Paprika, perhaps. Cayenne pepper.
“Saint’s blood!” she cries.
However dizzying this collection might seem, it is actually upholding a Roman Catholic tradition that dates back to at least the second century. Because many of the earliest saints were martyred for their faith, they were viewed as having suffered as Christ did, thus achieving a sublime perfection. Taking the symbolic body of Christ (the Eucharist) at an altar surrounded by the physical bodies of saints, then, became a prized spiritual experience—especially during the Middle Ages, when some relics were believed capable of producing miracles. Churches grew competitive with their reliquary collections and, as demand increased, developed a ranking system. First-class relics are pieces of a saint’s actual body: bones, blood, teeth, hair, fingernails, bits of flesh, and, in the case of Jesus, foreskin.2 Second-class relics consist of a saint’s earthly possessions, not only religious accoutrements like robes and rosaries but also more pedestrian
items like eyeglasses and combs. Weapons involved in the martyring of saints also fall into this category: spikes, knives, stones, and, in the case of Jesus, thorns from his crown and nails from his cross. Third-class relics, meanwhile, are objects that came into physical contact with first-class relics, while fourth-class relics touched second-class relics. This explains Sister Maximina’s ire with the doctor who assembled Mother Julia’s IV: he was mishandling primo relics.
We have now reached the final pages of Sister Maximina’s photo album. Just a few more images of bedsheets; just a final blur of veils. In a low voice, she remembers how, early the morning of November 21, 1974, she was sent to buy saline. As she rushed about from one farmacia to the next, a sister ran up, wide-eyed and urgent. They hurried home together.
First, Mother Julia asked all of the sisters gathered around to pray the rosary. Next, she asked them to sing. Then she didn’t ask for anything. Her eyes had been closed for much of the morning, but suddenly they glittered open as they had in her youth, when she prayed to the point of ecstasy, to the point of collapse. She smiled as she greeted her love of seventy-four years. Then she closed her eyes and was gone.
IT CAN TAKE DECADES—CENTURIES, EVEN—to be deemed a Catholic saint. First comes the obligatory five-year waiting period3 to allow mourners time to grieve you as well as to improve your odds of an objective evaluation. Then the church dispatches a postulator who scrutinizes your writings, teachings, and other “acts of holiness” and presents the evidence to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. If deemed worthy of the pope’s consideration, you are declared a “Servant of God.” To advance on to subsequent stages of sainthood, you must then bring about a miracle (or two).4
Mother Julia started performing miracles within a year of dying, says Sister Maximina. The first was for her gardener, who lived with his family in a rural farm community near Toluca. One day, his wife asked their son to mind the little sister while she did the wash. The boy promptly ran off to play. When the mother went searching, she found her three-year-old floating in a ditch, face down, dress bubbled up. The gardener ran to their neighbor’s house for a truck, and they sped off to the nearest clinic. But the doctor found no vital signs. He said their child was dead. The parents rushed their daughter to a second clinic, praying all the way. Again, the doctor said she showed no vital signs. The gardener fell upon his knees as his baby girl was laid upon a stretcher. Remembering Mother Julia, he begged for her intercession. He prayed and he prayed and he prayed to her. A hospital aide came to wheel his daughter away. Then one of her toes started twitching.
Such holy acts have earned Mother Julia the title of “Venerable,” which is the second of four stages to sainthood. Before she can advance to the next one—“Beatified”—she needs to perform a miracle the church can verify.
The miracle part—that’s no problem, says Sister Maximina. She just did another one last week. A Kingsville woman gave birth to a two-pound baby. The doctor predicted she wouldn’t last the night, but the mother bowed her head and pleaded for Mother Julia’s grace. Now her girl is growing gorda and strong.
“But for the church, a miracle has to happen like that,” Sister Maximina snaps her fingers. “No medicines or hospitals or anything. They need medical records, documentation by doctors and witnesses. And we don’t have that yet.”
She leans in close. “To tell you the truth,” she whispers, “sometimes I think they’re picky.”
FOR FORTY YEARS NOW, Sister Maximina and the other nuns in her convent have been memorializing the legacy of Mother Julia. An infinity of bake sales, clothing drives, bingos, raffles, and casino nights enabled them to buy back the property her old schoolhouse was originally built upon and transform the former tenant’s house into a chapel. (“And it wasn’t cheap,” Sister Maximina says. It wasn’t: $50,000.) Now they are raising another $50,000 to open a museum on the site. They plan to hang Mother Julia’s photographs there, her pamphlets, her robes, her prayer cards. The saucer she ate her toast upon. The pillow she laid her head upon. The wheelchair in which she took her final spins. They won’t display any of Mother Julia’s relics there, though—neither her catheter nor her blood. “I don’t want to risk losing them,” Sister Maximina says.
Not long ago, Sister Maximina marked her seventy-first birthday. The other nuns are even older. It is doubtful any will live to see their Mother Superior canonized. I personally find this crushing, the Catholic equivalent of Kafka publishing only a few stories or Van Gogh selling just one painting before their deaths. Yet the mystically minded are our nimblest border crossers. They traverse both space and time. If these nuns cannot alchemize Mother Julia from a mortal into a divine in this lifetime, they have faith that younger hands will spring up in the next. Which is maybe why—no matter what question I ask—Sister Maximina keeps lifting her palms in memory of that final morning she and her sisters gathered around the bed of their Mother Superior. They didn’t just witness the death of that living saint. They served as her aerial midwives.
“And that, mija,” she says, rising from the pew to indicate our interview is through, “that is a grace from God I will never repay.”
NOTES
1. Volumes could be written about the maguey’s significance in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Historically, the plant provided food, drink, medicine, and fiber for clothing. Today, Tejanos seed them in their front yards for good luck. The best story I’ve heard about the maguey comes courtesy of Santa Barraza’s mother, who contended that lonely soldiers copulated with the plant during the Mexican Revolution, leaving fetuses on the leaves. When Santa recreated that image in a painting, however, her mother protested, calling it witchcraft. Unperturbed, Santa continues using magueys in her work today, posing the plants directly behind her central figures so that they appear to have wings.
2. That’s right. Someone saved Jesus’s foreskin—or, apparently, foreskins (as, depending on the source, there were anywhere from eight to eighteen enshrined in various European churches throughout the Middle Ages). A friend of mine, David Farley, once spent a year in the Italian hill town of Calcata investigating the mysterious 1983 disappearance of a Holy Foreskin from a church there. Read all about it in his book An Irreverent Curiosity.
3. This waiting period can be waived by the pope for cases considered urgent, such as those of John Paul II and Mother Teresa (who were canonized nine and nineteen years after their deaths, respectively).
4. Martyrs—or people who die for their faith—are cut a little slack in this requirement. They must generate only one miracle.
4
The Activist and the Ordinance
SUZIE CANALES WAS CRUISING THE BACK ROADS OF CORPUS CHRISTI with her sister Cindy when something sinister caught their eye off the side of the road. They pulled over and retraced their route, walking against traffic. Though still within the city limits, they were far from any residential neighborhood. Down the knoll and beyond some trees, they could make out a pond-size body of darkness. Cindy ran back to lock the car. Don’t go down there without me! Naturally, Suzie did.
The water was thick as sludge and the color of scorched coal. It exuded an odor Suzie couldn’t place. Like tar, but danker. Cautiously, Suzie stuck a foot upon the mud bank surrounding it. Her shoe sank a few inches, but it seemed firm enough to hold her. What could it be? Given all the oil refineries in the area—Citgo, Flint Hills, Valero—the possibilities were endless. It could be crude oil. Hydraulic fracturing fluid. Drill cuttings. Petroleum waste. She took another step. It could be a benzene bath. A carcinogenic stew. A toxic—
Suddenly, she was submerged in it. Chest-high. A scream escaped. Sludge filled her open mouth and, in her panic, she swallowed. The darkness slithered down her throat. She flailed her limbs until they found something solid beneath. A pipeline of sorts. She clenched it between her feet.
Seeing her sister struggle, Cindy half-ran, half-tumbled down the knoll toward the bank. Finding a grassy spot, she extended her hand. Little sister to big sist
er. Growing up, these women weren’t especially close. Suzie had been the baby for seven years, until Cindy wailed along. Suzie had resented her ever since. Only now, in their forties, were they starting to connect. Now that they had lost their older sister, Diana. Now that they had formed a coalition to fight what might have killed her.
The sisters locked eyes and gripped hands. On the count of three. One. Two. But Suzie’s hands were too slick. She slipped deeper into the sludge. Cindy screamed with frustration before reaching out once more. Again, she lost her grip. Suzie sank further into the murk. The third try. This is it. They stared hard into each other’s eyes. This is too much! They burst out laughing. That’s when Cindy’s adrenaline surged. Clutching her sister by both wrists, she yanked her from the swamp. The two stumbled backward onto the mud bank where Suzie lay in a heap. I swallowed some. I swallowed some.
As baptisms go, Suzie’s was gruesome but fitting. Here was a woman who had dedicated her life to fighting oil companies—and she nearly drowned in one of their pits.
OIL REFINERIES ARE THE FIRST SIGHT to greet you upon entering my hometown. They line both sides of the interstate, a city onto themselves, sprawling across hundreds of acres of land as they rise in towering mazes of pipe and steel, looking both antiquated and futuristic as they emit plumes of smoke into the sky. Their storage tanks are mostly painted hospital green or tenement cream, though some sport murals of dolphins and sea turtles and say things like “Sharing the Earth with Responsibility: CITGO.” Powdery black hills of the petroleum byproduct known as “petcoke” abound.
Because they are the backbone of our economy, criticizing these refineries makes you a polarizing figure. If someone doesn’t work for a refinery themselves, their tío surely does. So city officials tend to wince when Suzie Canales comes knocking at the door. They dispatch their secretaries to stonewall her. Industry reps are even less diplomatic: they reach for the phone and dial security. The media love her, since she’s a reliable source of opinion. She appears on the evening news so often, though, she can seem like a zealot. When I mention my plans to have breakfast with her one morning, a friend asks, “You mean, the crazy one?” But that’s why I want to meet Suzie. Like the other Tejanos I’ve been admiring lately—Santa Barraza, Lionel Lopez, Sister Maximina—she appears to have transcended the typical preoccupations of family, career, and self and channeled her fervor into something greater.
All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition Page 6