Blessed María Agustina Rivas López

Antonia Luzmila Rivas "Aguchita" López, RGS (María Agustina in religion; 13 June 1920 – 27 September 1990) was a Peruvian Catholic religious sister of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd. Rivas studied in Lima before she became a religious sister. She made her perpetual vows in the late 1940s before she served as an educator for children. But she also had an active role in the care and education for indigenous populations and peasant women while she oversaw a number of different health and catechetical programs. Rivas worked at a time when the communist-oriented Shining Path terrorist group was on the rise and threatened local relislain communities. She was slain in 1990 when a teenage girl from the Shining Path shot her dead with a rifle when she tried to intercede for the villagers that she was with at the time; her death rattled her order, which pondered whether to leave the area. The process for Rivas' beatification was initiated in Peru in 2017 and she became titled as a Servant of God at the outset. Pope Francis determined in 2021 that Rivas had been slain "in odium fidei" (in hatred of the faith) hence permitted for her to be beatified; the beatification was celebrated in La Florida, Peru, on 7 May 2022. Antonia Luzmila Rivas López was born on 13 June 1920 in Coracora in the Parinacochas Province as the first of eleven children born to Damaso Rivas and Modesta López de Rivera. Her devout parents educated her and her siblings in their faith and from her childhood she developed a strong passion for nature with its abundance of plants and local farm animals. In her childhood she also helped her mother with her duties inside the house; her mother did her best to take her to Mass each morning despite the distance involved. Rivas and her siblings all attended catechetical instruction in their local parish while her brother César entered the priesthood and was ordained as a Redemptorist.