Saint Dulce of the Poor

She was born Maria Rita in Salvador, Bahia, on May 26, 1914, into what the Holy See's biography calls a well-off family of strong Christian conviction and active charity. ²⁵ Her father, Augusto Lopes Pontes, was a dentist and a professor at the Federal University of Bahia; her mother, Dulce Maria, died when she was six, according to Angelus, and Vatican News says she went to live with her aunts. ³⁶⁷ The CNBB adds that as a girl she loved dolls, kites and football. ⁵

At thirteen an aunt took her through the poorest part of the city, and the sources agree that it marked her. ³⁵⁶ Angelus says she began giving the poor of her neighborhood free haircuts and dressing their injuries; the CNBB says she turned her parents' house into a place of welcome for beggars and the sick, so crowded that it became known as "the Portaria de São Francisco", Saint Francis's gate. ⁵⁶ Vatican News records her devotion to Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and her readiness to perform the "small acts of love" that Jesus turns into great works. ³

She qualified as a teacher and entered the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, a congregation affiliated with the Friars Minor, at São Cristóvão in Sergipe. ²⁵⁷ The dates differ. The CNBB has her entering on February 8, 1933, just after her graduation; her congregation says she qualified on February 8, 1932, and entered the following year. ⁵⁷

So does the moment she took her mother's name. The CNBB dates it to August 13, 1933, when she received the habit. ⁵ Angelus also places it at the clothing, a year after she entered at eighteen. ⁶ Her congregation's English page says she received the name when she professed her vows in 1934. ⁷ All three agree that the name was her mother's. ⁵⁶⁷

Her first assignment was teaching in one of the congregation's schools in Salvador, but the CNBB says her mind was on the poor, and by 1935 she was working among the stilt houses of Alagados, where people called her the "Angel of Alagados". ⁵⁶ The Holy See describes her service as nurse and teacher, and her particular care for the least and the most suffering. ²

In 1936, at twenty-two, she founded the São Francisco Workers' Union with a Franciscan friar, Hildebrando Kruthaup; Angelus calls it the first Christian workers' movement in Bahia. ⁶⁷ The CNBB says it led to the Workers' Circle of Bahia in 1937, funded by three cinemas the two of them had built with donations. ⁵ In May 1939 she opened the Santo Antônio school for workers and their children. ⁵⁷ Vatican News adds a clinic and a library. ³ The Holy See names the education of workers as one of her commitments. ²

The sick kept coming. Vatican News says she first housed them in abandoned buildings on "Rat Island", a rundown part of the city, until a series of evictions left them nowhere to go. ³ Angelus dates the abandoned houses to 1939. ⁶ Then her superior let her use the henhouse beside the convent of Santo Antônio, on condition that she look after the chickens. ³ Vatican News records how she did it: by feeding them to her patients. ³ The CNBB dates the henhouse to 1949, when she had 70 sick people and nowhere to put them. ⁵

That henhouse is the origin of the Santo Antônio Hospital. ³⁶ In May 1959 she set up the charitable foundation now known as the Obras Sociais Irmã Dulce, and the Holy See names the "Albergue Santo Antônio", the shelter, as the fullest expression of her charity. ²³⁶ Her congregation says she would pick the sick up from the streets and dress their wounds herself, and was ready to set aside any rule that stood in the way of welcoming them. ⁷

Counts of the hospital differ with the year and the source: Vatican News gives 1,500 beds, Angelus more than 1,000, and the CNBB 954 in its main complex. ³⁵⁶ Her niece, who later ran the foundation, told the CNBB that despite her poor health she rose at five, ate very little, visited the patients and the doctors, did the paperwork, and only then went out to beg for donations. ⁵ In hard moments, she said, Sister Dulce repeated that the work was not hers but God's, and that what is God's remains forever. ⁵

Her own health was fragile. ⁷ Angelus says she suffered from lung failure for the last thirty years of her life, and she spent sixteen months in her own hospital before she died. ³⁶ There, according to Vatican News, John Paul II visited her during his journey to Brazil in 1990. ³ In 1988 President José Sarney had nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize. ³⁶

She died in Salvador on March 13, 1992, at seventy-seven. ²³ The Holy See says she met her last illness serenely and entirely abandoned into the Lord's arms. ² Angelus traces the moves of her body, to the convent chapel in 2000 and to the church of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God in 2010, and reports that it was found incorrupt; the other sources here do not mention it. ⁶

Benedict XVI recognized her heroic virtue on April 3, 2009, and she was beatified on May 22, 2011. ²³ The miracle for her canonization, her congregation says, was the restoring of sight to a blind person. ⁷ Pope Francis canonized her in Rome on October 13, 2019, with John Henry Newman and three others, and said of her and the other two religious women that "the consecrated life is a journey of love at the existential peripheries of the world". ¹

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Sister Dulce, so none is given here. ²³⁵⁶ "Of the Poor" is part of the name under which she was canonized, not a patronage. ⁴⁵

Saint Dulce of the Poor's feast is August 13. ⁴ The Brazilian bishops' conference wrote on August 13, 2020, that on that day the Church throughout the world keeps her liturgical feast, the first since her canonization. ⁴ The date is the anniversary of her clothing in 1933, when, according to the CNBB, she took the name Dulce. ⁵ It is not the anniversary of her death, which was March 13. ²

The story of the henhouse is funny, and the sources tell it with a straight face: she was allowed the space on condition that she care for the chickens, and she cared for them by cooking them for the sick. ³ It is the kind of obedience that keeps to the letter of a rule and still finds a way to feed somebody.

Her niece remembered a woman who said she saw Christ in the people she served, and who listened carefully even when she was exhausted. ⁵ Her congregation says the same thing more plainly: she saw him in the image of the needy. ⁷ Neither source makes it sound easy.

She was ill for much of her life and ended it in her own hospital, a patient among patients. ³⁶ The Holy See says she faced that last illness with serenity. ² She called what she built God's work and not her own, and her niece says that the people who run it now hold on to that when the difficulties look insurmountable. ⁵