Blessed Aguchita – Model of Mercy!
Honor Blessed Sr. María Agustina “Aguchita” de Jesús Rivas López, a martyr and advocate for women and children.
She was a sister of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the same congregation of our Sister Martha Gomez, the Director of Consecrated Life for the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston.
Learn from Blessed Aguchita’s elite example of faithfulness and service for the love of Christ even in the face of persecution and distrust “no matter the cost.”
June 13th is Blessed Aguchita’s birthday.
Known as Sister Aguchita by her family, friends, and those she loved working with and for in Peru, she did not just serve to comfort and console, but to educate and empower the marginalized especially women and young girls. Blessed Aguchita was martyred, killed on Sept. 27, 1990, in the village square where she served by guerrillas, who despised her presence and any “outsider” in their region simply for doing charitable work, believing it was work was to humiliate the locals of the La Florida territory. She was beatified last month with a Mass in the same plaza where she and others were shot to death.
Words of Blessed Aguchita to inspire us to love, care, and show mercy for others like Christ, even when we least feel like it:
“To love when we are loved (and) do good when everyone around us treats us the same way is no great charity, it is a pleasant courtesy; but to love and do good when we are slandered, precisely to those who slander us, this is charity.
“(Similarly)To be cheerful and courteous when our heart beats regularly, when health makes everything easy and helps the will to act well is no merit, but an expansion of the excess of strength and joy that we carry within us; (however) to appear kind, smiling, friendly, and attentive to the wishes of others when our body is consumed with sickness, making us unable to think, within in severe pain, this is virtue… worth more than life.”
You can read more in her book, a biography/autobiography: Aguchita – Mercy and Justice.