In decrees released on March 14, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints advanced 26 candidates toward beatification, including Rose Hawthorne (Mother Mary Alphonsa), the daughter of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Vatican decrees certified miracles attributed to three candidates, and proclaimed the heroic virtues of seven others. The dicastery also announced the martyrdom of a German priest and of 15 German-born nuns who were killed in Poland by Soviet troops.
Born in 1851, Rose Hawthorne was raised mostly in Massachusetts. She married George Parsons Lathrop in 1971. Their only child, a son, died at the age of five. George and Rose were received into the Catholic Church in 1891. After her husband’s death in 1898, Rose became a Dominican sister. She founded the Dominican Sistesr of Saint Rose of Lima and spent her life working with cancer patients, until her death in 1926.