Maria Agreda’s four volume ”The Mystical City of God” sat on a book shelf just above my eye level during the time I worked as assistant librarian at Incarnate Word Academy Library a number of years ago. I noticed it often when I reshelved books for that section after they had been checked in. But it wasn’t until I began researching Maria’s life recently that I discovered the person whom some writers describe as the greatest female influence during the seventeenth century.

Even though The Mystical City was her main work, I discovered it was only a portion of her writings. She wrote a number of other books, letters to Philip IV, king of Spain for some 22 years and a letter to Pope Alexander VII that helped to end the hostilities between France and Spain. Yet, such influence was not without its price—as the silence of her monastery would be the battleground of her growth in holiness.

Maria’s story has been included in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, The New Handbook of Texas, and The Texas Almanac, The Journal of Anthropological Research as well as in two books by Evelyn Underhill. Grolier Scholastic released an encyclopedia of 1,000 important Hispanic Americans in 2006 where Maria is featured among such notables as Padre Antonio Margil, Father of the Texas missions.

She has also been the subject of book biographies by James A. Carrico, Clark A. Colahan, Marilyn H. Fedewa, T. D. Kendrick, Beulah Karney, Padre Enrique Llamas, OCD, and Jimenez Jose Samaniego. Marilyn Fedewa also wrote an article that appeared in U.S. Catholic. A symposium on Maria’s life was held at the University of New Mexico in 2009. The Texas Catholic Historical Society honored Fedewa’s book ”Maria of Agreda: Mystical Lady in Blue” in 2010 ”for its outstanding contribution to Texas Catholic history.”

Maria was born on April 2, 1602, the eldest of 11 children of Francisco Coronel and Catalina de Arana of which only four survived. Even as a child she seemed larger than life; the way her biographers describe her spiritual sensitivity. Her influence began at 16 when she convinced her father to convert their castle into a convent for Franciscan nuns.

Her mother and a sister entered the order of Poor Clares with her and her father, at 63, became a Franciscan friar. She was allowed to become abbess at 25 with a papal dispensation and, except for three years, she held that position her entire life. Her community grew in numbers to the extent she had to establish a new monastery outside the city in 1633.

The Mystical City is a 2,700 page series of private revelations of the life of the Virgin Mary given to Maria beginning in 1620. Some 100 pages of the text are about the Immaculate Conception.

Following its publication, controversy ensued and the book was put on the Index of Prohibited Books after the Inquisition condemned it in 1681. Shortly thereafter, Pope Innocent XI revoked the decree at the request of the king. The universities of Salamanca, Toulouse and the Louvain examined the text again in 1729 and approved it.

Maria’s influence continues even today as some modern Marian scholars credit this controversy as pushing forward the Church’s declaration of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX in 1854.

A number of Maria’s 500 visions focused on Spain’s possessions in the New World, notably the Southwest. Stories of ”a lady in blue” appearing to the Jumano Native Americans were reported and documented. What is interesting to note in those reports of these meetings is that both the ”lady” and the Jumano Indians spoke in their native languages yet understood each other which echo the Pentecost story.

This mutual understanding likely began in Maria’s prayer life; one that centered on communal prayer. She felt her community’s exercises nourished her far more than her own private devotions—a telling point of what is essential for us today as Catholics in terms of prayer. Private devotions have their place and an important one; however, we are called to community and to community prayer.

Maria wrote once how much silence was important to her. ”Every soul, without exception, is capable of embracing its inner light,” she wrote. ”Yet in order to receive so delicate an influence, quiet is essential.”

Maria’s life of prayer speaks powerfully to me as she is a model of how to evangelize: pray like everything depends on me and speak to others in ways they can understand.

Many people who have a regular prayer schedule know how difficult praying is at times. For Maria prayer was more than difficult. There are stories how the devil would attack her making prayer close to impossible at times yet she persisted. Then there was a substitute confessor who commanded her to burn The Mystical City manuscript and well as other items that she had written under obedience.

When her regular confessor returned, he commanded her to rewrite the entire manuscript. She summed up the difficulty she had when she wrote in one section, ” . . . I have not composed a sentence or a word, nor have I brought myself to write the least part of it, without experiencing more temptations than the letters of the alphabet of which it is composed.”

There were those who discounted Maria’s ability at bilocation and her private revelations, both during her lifetime and after her death, yet they had no doubt about her holiness. Stories of bilocation and private revelations can be exciting to read about, however, God wants more for us than exciting stories, and because He does, He graces us with the human faces of holiness.

Sor Maria Agreda’s legacy to us is an example of what has been an essential for 2,000 years; prayerful silence is more powerful than we can possibly ever imagine.