María Guadalupe García Zavala

On October 13, 1901, Guadalupe García Zavala founded, with Father Cipriano Iñiguez Martín del Campo, the congregation of the Handmaids of Saint Margaret Mary and the Poor (Siervas de Santa Margarita María y de los Pobres), placed under the patronage of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The new community dedicated itself to the care of the poor sick, particularly in the hospital founded in Guadalajara. Mother Lupita was appointed superior general, a position she would hold until the end of her life. A devoted nurse, she placed herself at the service of the most abandoned without considering poverty or the lack of means: it is reported that she would kneel beside the sick to care for them with tenderness. When the hospital's resources ran low, she did not hesitate to beg in the streets with her sisters to provide for the patients' needs. During the years of religious persecution in Mexico, marked by the Cristero War (1926-1929), she hid wanted priests and even the Archbishop of Guadalajara in her hospital, while her nuns cared for both the wounded and the persecutors indiscriminately. The congregation received diocesan approval in 1935.

The holiness of Madre Lupita was not manifested by any outward display, but in daily fidelity to the service of the poorest, performed with gentleness and compassion. Having renounced a comfortable life to follow the call of Christ, she taught, according to Pope Francis, to love poverty in order to love the poor and the sick more. Her spirituality, rooted in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and inspired by Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, made the care of suffering bodies an act of love for Christ himself. Pope Francis summarized this intuition by evoking the gesture of "touching the flesh of Christ": "the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the marginalized are the flesh of Christ." Her charity knew no boundaries: during the persecution, she helped both the victims and their persecutors. Her reputation for holiness, spread during her lifetime and after her death among the people of Guadalajara, led to the opening of her cause for beatification in the mid-1980s.

The cause for the beatification of Guadalupe García Zavala was introduced in the mid-1980s. Pope John Paul II recognized a first miracle attributed to her intercession by decree on December 20, 2003, and proclaimed her blessed during a celebration in Saint Peter's Square, in Rome, on April 25, 2004. A second miracle, required for canonization, was approved under the pontificate of Benedict XVI, who set the date during the consistory of cardinals on February 11, 2013—the very day he announced his resignation from the papacy. It was therefore the newly elected Pope Francis who celebrated the canonization on May 12, 2013, in Saint Peter's Square, at the same time as that of Laura Montoya and the martyrs of Otranto. Madre Lupita thus became one of the first saints canonized by Pope Francis. Her liturgical feast is set for June 24, the anniversary of her death.

The legacy of Madre Lupita remains first and foremost the congregation she founded, the Handmaids of Saint Margaret Mary and the Poor, which continues to care for the sick and serve the poor in the spirit of charity of its founder. Beyond Mexico, where her cult is particularly vibrant in Guadalajara and Zapopan, the congregation has spread to several countries, including Peru and Iceland. Because of her lifelong dedication to the care of the sick, as a nurse kneeling beside the suffering, she is honored as the patroness of nurses and invoked by those who dedicate themselves to the service of the sick. An emblematic figure of 20th-century Mexican holiness, alongside the saints and martyrs of the Cristero era, she embodies a concrete charity, attentive to bodies as much as to souls, and a testimony of reconciliation, having helped friends and adversaries alike without distinction during the persecutions. Her example continues to inspire Christian caregivers and popular devotion in Mexico.