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This week’s mission hero is an amazing Brazilian woman of the Twentieth Century, St. Dulce.
Maria Rita de Souza Pontes was born on May 26, 1914 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. When she was thirteen years-old, her aunt took her on a trip to a very poor area of the city. When Dulce saw the misery and poverty there, she was deeply touched, for this was a new experience for her as a girl from an upper middle-class background.
Soon, she began to care for the homeless and beggars in her neighborhood, giving them free haircuts and caring for their wounds.
When she graduated from high school at age eighteen, she joined the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God. A year later, she received the habit of her congregation and took the name Dulce in memory of her mother who had died when Dulce was six.
Soon, she founded a Christian worker’s movement and started working in the poorer areas of the city. By 1939, Sr. Dulce had attracted many needy persons, and she was always trying to find them lodging, food, medicine, and health care. Whenever she found a space, she and her collection of sick people would be thrown out on the street to search for another place. People began calling her “Angel of Alagados,” after the area of Bahia where she was working.
Finally, when she had 70 people to care for, Sr. Dulce asked the superior of the convent to allow her to use the convent’s chicken yard as a temporary shelter. The Superior agreed on the condition that Dulce take care of the chickens. Sr. Dulce did; she fed them to her poor sick. In time, that chicken hostel became 1,500-bed Hospital Santo Antonio.
