Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
I want to talk mostly about today's saint, but the Gospel obviously is teaching us that if we are forgiven by God, we must forgive our neighbor, we must forgive our brother, because to offend God is something far greater, an enormous debt that we could never pay on our own, whereas an offense against one of our fellow human beings is something much smaller, and so if we have been forgiven the huge debt of our sins against God, we must certainly forgive the little debt of the offenses that our neighbor may commit against us.
Today is Saint Beatrice of Silva. She was born in Ceuta, which is in Africa, across the strait from Gibraltar. This was Portuguese territory at the time. Her father had fought to conquer it. The family was a noble one, and she was related to the Princess Isabella, the daughter of Prince John of Portugal. She grew up with Princess Isabella at their court.
In 1447, Isabella married King John II of Castile, and Beatrice went to live with her in the court. She was very beautiful, and this aroused jealousy in the court. The people told lies to the Queen about Beatrice, and she came to believe, that is the Queen came to believe, that her beloved relative was plotting to have her killed so that she could become the Queen. So the Queen locked her up in a poorly ventilated underground vault and left her to die. 
Saint Beatrice, in distress, prayed to Mary Immaculate, praying, asking her, begging her to save her. And Our Lady appeared to her, carrying the child Jesus and dressed in a white habit with a blue mantle. She assured Beatrice that she would not die there, rather she would found a great order dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, whose daughters would wear a habit like the one she could see Mary wearing. After three days, Beatrice's uncle got the Queen to tell her what had happened to Beatrice. She took him down to the vault to show him the body of the supposed traitor. But when she opened the vault, Beatrice was not dead or haggard from three days of confinement, rather she was literally glowing from the aftereffects of the vision. The obvious miracle made her innocence clear. 
Beatrice left the court and became a nun. She lived about 30 years in Dominican Monastery in Toledo. Then in 1484, she was finally able to begin her mission of founding the Order of the Immaculate Conception. Queen Isabella the Catholic, the daughter of that Queen Isabella who had locked up Saint Beatrice, gave her the castle of Gaudiano to use as her first monastery. The nuns wore a white habit with a blue mantle and initially followed a modified Cistercian rule. Five years later, on April 30th, 1489, Pope Innocent VIII approved the foundation and the rule. Saint Beatrice died a little over a year later before the monastery had really got going. 
After her death, the community was combined with the community of Benedictine nuns and this combined community kept the same Marian habit but would now follow the rule of the Poor Clares. It was a period of uncertainty and difficulty for the young community. Cardinal Cisneros of Franciscan and the Bishop of Toledo was given the charge of reforming the religious orders of Spain. So he worked also to reform or to set in order the Conceptionist Poor Clares. He moved these nuns to a new and larger monastery and helped complete the final form of their Poor Clares rule, which was approved in 1511. 
Some see the fact that they became Poor Clares as a mistake because it didn't happen during the life of the founders. However, Saint Beatrice's brother was Blessed Amadeus, the founder of a Franciscan reform. So she may well have had something Franciscan in her spirituality as well. But the most convincing proof that it was not a mistake was the way that the Conceptionist Poor Clares flourished. The monasteries were in Spain, but by 1540 they were already in Mexico, which had only gotten a bishop ten years before. At its peak, the order had 200 monasteries, and in 1976, when Saint Beatrice was canonized, there were 3,000 nuns in 150 monasteries. 
So it is indeed a great order, as Our Lady said it would be, not just in numbers but also for some of its notable members. One of them is Venerable Inés de San Pablo, who was the first to promote consecration to Mary in a slavery of love as a mass phenomenon as opposed to an isolated devotion. She was born in 1563 in Spain and was clothed with a Conceptionist habit in the monastery of Alcalá de Henares on October 7, 1575. There she founded the first Confraternity of Marian Slavery, which is approved on August 2, 1595. She was not a writer, it was two Franciscan theologians who prepared the statutes for the confraternity and wrote booklets to explain the devotion, Fra Juan de los Andes and Fra Melchior de Cetina. 
Decades after her death, the Conceptionists founded monasteries in France, bringing the devotion with them. And thus, Cardinal de Verruel came to know of it and became part of the French School of Spirituality. And Saint Louis de Montfort, trained in the French School of Spirituality, learned in this way of Marian slavery and taught it, developed this doctrine, and expressed it wonderfully in his treatise on True Devotion. So he didn't invent it, he did develop the doctrine and develop its basis. But this is something that he got from the Conceptionist Poor Clares, and they, of course, from other saints before them. 
Venerable Maria of San Pablo was another notable Conceptionist. She grew up in the royal court of Spain. In 1567 when she was 30 she entered the Conceptionists. She reformed two monasteries and served as abbess for several years. And then, in 1603, she founded a branch of greater rigor and stricter observance, the Discalced Recolet Conceptionists. 
Mother Mariana de Jesús Torres, born in 1563 in Spain, led a group of Conceptionist missionary nuns that founded a monastery in Quito. She is best known for the apparitions of Our Lady of Good Success, which predicted various problems of the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly a decline in religious life. 
Venerable María de Jesús Tomelín, called the Lily of Puebla, was born in Mexico in 1579. Her wealthy father was so opposed to her vocation that, at one point, he was going to stab her to death rather than let her enter the monastery. After a year of novitiate, she professed vows in 1599. Her life was marked by an abundance of mystical gifts and by misunderstandings and calumnies. She bore these trials with humility, charity, and joy, proving the genuineness of her virtue, and went to her reward in 1537. 
The most famous Conceptionist is Venerable Mary of Agreda, born in Spain in 1602. When she was 16 her father became a Franciscan friar, which left her mother free to become a nun. Her house was transformed into a monastery. From when she was 18 to 26, 1620 to 1631, she regularly bi-located to an area that's now in Texas and New Mexico. And there, she taught the Native Americans about Christ and his Church.
When the Franciscan missionaries arrived they were surprised to find that the Natives had been fully instructed in the Catholic faith by a mysterious lady in blue, and they were now asking for baptism. When she was 25 she received a dispensation so that she could become abbess, and she remained abbess for the rest of her life. She had revelations about the life of the Mother of God and wrote them down, but a confessor who was there as a substitute for about a month ordered her to burn the manuscript, and this she obediently did, even though she'd written it in obedience.
When the regular confessor returned, she had to write it again, and again she obeyed, finishing in 1660. This is the book known in multiple volumes as The Mystical City of God, which speaks of Our Lady as the Mystical City of God that descended from heaven. She died on Pentecost Sunday, 1665. Leaving aside other venerables, the last figure of note is Venerable Maria de Los Ángeles Sorazu, who was born in Spain in 1873. At 18, she entered the monastery of the Most Pure Conception in Valladolid, and in 1904 she became its abbess, a position she held for the rest of her life. She was favored with revelations and seems to have been especially connected to St. Louis de Montfort. She often thought that her guardian angel was the same guardian angel that he had had, and in a vision, he called upon her to break down a metaphorical wall that was restraining sanctity in the church, so that Marian devotion could freely expand.
This obstacle seems to be the false idea that Mary is somehow a hindrance rather than a help to union with God, someone who might be useful to us in the beginning, but who must eventually be set aside so that we can be mystically united with the Trinity. That was not her experience as she found the Trinity in Mary, and God explained to her that those who think that they unite themselves to God directly are, in fact, united through Mary, but don't realize it. She wrote, I owe everything to the Blessed Virgin. Although I tended toward perfection, observance, and the practice of virtues, when I consecrated myself to Our Lady, I was still far from God, full of defects, like a wild trunk that stands without fruit. But as soon as the Marian life was established in my soul, this trunk grew with surprising rapidity. She encourages us to follow in her example, to dedicate ourselves, consecrate ourselves to Our Lady, and live that consecration in a real search for sanctity. 
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.