May God make me a saint was the blood-signed declaration of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It is impossible to imagine that this was a false signature, written to fulfill a whim or shield herself from the world. In that signature—as the works gathered in this issue of Perspectivas demonstrate—something more than an ideal takes shape: an intense struggle to attain perfection within the confines of the cloister.

There are numerous firsthand testimonies to the profoundly Christian virtues of the Hieronymite nun. The most important of these was undoubtedly that of her first biographer, Father Diego Calleja, who emphasizes that Sor Juana’s final “illness” was charity toward her plague-stricken sisters at the Convent of San Jerónimo: she fell ill from being too charitable, Calleja declares. The same priest recounts those final two or three years, which have been called the most beautiful hours of her existence.

The Benedictine monk Jean Leclercq wrote a text that strikes at the heart of the intuition shared by those who, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, seek to place riches in their understanding rather than their understanding in riches. Leclercq’s work, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, describes how learned ignorance—that impulse to know more in order to contemplate God more fully—finds its home within the cloister.

Commenting on Leclercq’s text at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, Pope Benedict XVI emphasized that “A God who is merely thought up or invented is not God”. The same could be said of holiness and of the love of learning. To ask God to make us holy is to ask Him to reveal Himself to us. And God reveals Himself through attentive listening and meditation on His word, and through self-giving to one’s neighbor. The love of learning—Sor Juana’s love—is a means of arriving at beauty, goodness, and truth. So too is the imitation of Christ: giving one’s very life for the sisters of the Convent.

Few figures have had their memory distorted and distorted again as thoroughly as Sor Juana has been by hundreds of written works. I am confident that this volume of Perspectivas will fill a void left by so many discordant voices—and it will fill it in the way Christianity knows best: sustaining faith with reason and purifying reason with faith. Sor Juana deserves to be recognized both for her desire for holiness and for her love of learning. As a Mexican bishop, I could imagine no greater joy.

+Ramón Castro y Castro

Bishop of Cuernavaca and President of the Conference of the Mexican Espiscopate

Caption: +Ramón Castro y Castro, Bishop of Cuernavaca and President of the Conference of the Mexican Espiscopate