Suscitans a terra inopem, et de stercore erigens pauperem: ut collocet eum cum principibus, cum principibus populi sui. “Raising up the needy from the earth, and lifting up the poor out of the dunghill: that he may place him with princes, with the princes of his people.” — Psalm 112:7-8
I. A note on this entry
St. Martin de Porres stands at the very edge of the traditional calendar. He was canonised on the sixth of May, 1962, only weeks before the typical edition of the 1962 Missale Romanum was promulgated, and he was never placed in its General Calendar. For more than a century before that, as a Blessed, his feast had been kept in the proper calendar of the Order of Preachers, which honoured him in its own rite with a Mass and Office of his own. In the universal Church, the Mass of today is that of the preceding Sunday, resumed on the first free day after All Saints and All Souls.
When John XXIII pronounced the solemn formula of canonisation, he declared Blessed Martin de Porres, Confessor, to be a saint. The title is exact. Martin was not a priest, a bishop, a founder, or a martyr. He was a lay brother who swept floors, cut hair, nursed the sick, and fed the poor of a colonial city, and the Church named him a confessor of the faith for it.
He belongs to this week for a reason beyond the date. The Church has just kept the feast of all the saints, most of whom no one remembers, and the commemoration of all the dead, most of whom no one prays for any longer. Martin spent his life among exactly those people: the poor, the sick, the abandoned, and the dying of Lima, whom the city did not see. The Church has made him, in effect, the patron of the unseen.
II. Lima
Martin was born in Lima, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, on the ninth of December, 1579. His father was Don Juan de Porres, a Spanish nobleman from Burgos and a knight of the military Order of Alcántara. His mother was Ana Velázquez, a freed woman of African descent from Panama. They were not married. Two years later a daughter, Juana, was born to them.
The boy was baptised in the parish church of San Sebastián, at the same font where, seven years later, the infant Isabel Flores de Oliva would be baptised, the future St. Rose of Lima. The baptismal register is said to have recorded him as the son of an unknown father. Don Juan did not at first acknowledge the children. They had their mother’s dark skin, and in the strict hierarchy of colonial society that mattered a great deal.
Lima was then one of the richest cities in the world. Silver from the mines of Potosí passed through it on its way to Spain. Its churches and convents were magnificent. But beneath the viceroy’s court lay a society ranked by birth and by colour: Spaniards born in Spain, then Spaniards born in America, then those of mixed blood, then the native peoples, and at the bottom the Africans, most of them enslaved. A child born of a Spanish knight and a freed African woman belonged to a class that the law treated with suspicion and that polite society preferred not to notice. Martin knew from his earliest years what it meant to be looked down on.
Ana raised her children in poverty. After some years Don Juan relented and took both children with him to Guayaquil, in present-day Ecuador, where he saw to their early schooling. When he was appointed to an office in Panama, he left his daughter with relatives in Guayaquil and sent Martin back to his mother in Lima, with provision for his training. The boy was apprenticed to a barber-surgeon.
In the Spanish world a barber was much more than a cutter of hair. He let blood, set bones, dressed wounds, pulled teeth, and prepared herbal remedies. It was the medicine of the poor, who could not pay physicians. Martin learned it thoroughly, and it became the instrument of his whole life. Even as a youth he used his skill without charge for those who had nothing, and he gave away much of what he earned. He also began, while still a boy, the habit of long prayer at night that he never gave up.
III. The habit of a donado
At about the age of fifteen Martin asked to be received at the great Dominican convent of the Most Holy Rosary in Lima, known as Santo Domingo. He did not ask to be a priest, or even a lay brother. He asked to be received as a donado, one of the lowest members of the household: a tertiary who wore a form of the habit, lived in the convent, and did its servile work, without the vows or the standing of the friars.
There were two reasons for this. The first was the law of the province. The Dominican houses of Peru, like most religious houses of the colonial Americas, did not then admit men of African or native descent to profession as friars. Martin could not have been received as a brother even had he asked. The second reason was his own humility. All the early witnesses agree that he chose the lowest place willingly and would have kept it gladly for the rest of his life.
For nine years he swept the cloisters, cleaned the infirmary, worked in the kitchen and the laundry, and served as the convent’s barber. The friars came to know him first as the young man with the broom, and the broom has remained his emblem ever since. In 1603, at the age of twenty-four, his superiors set the law aside in his case and admitted him to profession as a lay brother, a frater cooperator, of the Order of Preachers. He made his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on the second of June of that year. The tradition of the convent holds that he resisted the change, and that only obedience persuaded him to accept it.
IV. The poor mulatto
The convent remembered him as a man without any sense of his own importance. He called himself, in the speech of the time, a poor mulatto, and sometimes worse. It is hard for a modern reader to hear the words he used of himself. He took the contempt that others directed at men of his colour, and instead of resenting it he accepted it as a share in the humiliation of Christ.
One episode, handed down in the tradition of Santo Domingo, sums up the man. The convent fell heavily into debt, and the prior went into the city to sell some of the house’s valuables to raise money. Martin ran after him and stopped him. Sell me instead, he told the prior in substance: I am only a poor mulatto, and I belong to the Order; put me up for sale, and pay the debt with the price. The prior was moved and refused. Whether or not the words are exact, the story was told of him because everyone who knew him believed he meant such things.
His humility was not timidity. He could rebuke a proud friar, and he did. He could tell a viceroy what he needed to hear. But he never defended himself. When he was insulted, he answered with silence or with a kindness. When he was praised, he changed the subject. When some of the friars treated him with contempt because of his birth, as some did, he served them with particular care. St. Paul tells the Philippians to let nothing be done through contention, neither by vain glory: but in humility, let each esteem others better than themselves (Phil. 2:3). Martin did this not as an occasional effort but as the settled habit of his soul.
V. The infirmary of Santo Domingo
The convent of Santo Domingo housed some two to three hundred friars, and Martin was for most of his religious life its infirmarian. He nursed the sick friars by day and night, and his care became famous. He seemed to know when a man needed him before he was called. Friars who were near death recovered under his hands, and many of them testified afterward that he had healed them. He had the skill of a barber-surgeon, but his brethren believed that what he did went beyond skill.
His charity did not stop at the convent wall. The poor of Lima came to the gate of Santo Domingo in great numbers, and Martin was put in charge of the alms. He fed them, clothed them, and treated their wounds. He sought out the sick in their hovels, in the streets, and in the quarters of the slaves, and he brought them medicine and food. Rich men of the city, the viceroy among them, gave him money for his poor, because they trusted that every coin would reach someone in need.
The tradition of the convent records two episodes from these years that show both his charity and his obedience.
Once he found in the street a beggar, nearly naked and covered in sores, and he carried the man into the convent and laid him in his own bed. A friar protested at the uncleanness. Martin answered, in substance, that compassion was worth more than cleanliness: with a little soap he could wash his bed, but no tears would wash from his soul the stain of hardness toward the poor.
Later, because the convent was being overrun, the superiors forbade him to bring the sick of the city inside the cloister. Soon afterward Martin found a man in the street bleeding from a knife wound and brought him in. He was rebuked for disobedience. He answered with simplicity that he had not known that the precept of obedience took precedence over the precept of charity, and asked to be instructed. The prior, the story says, was silenced, and gave him leave to follow his charity as he judged best. Our Lord gave the same answer to those who reproached Him for healing on the Sabbath: Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to destroy? (Mark 3:4).
VI. The orphans, the animals, and the wonders
The foundlings. Martin was grieved by the children of the city who had been abandoned by their parents and were growing up in the streets without care or instruction. With the support of benefactors he helped to establish in Lima a house where such children could be sheltered, taught their faith and a trade, and given a chance at an honest life. He arranged dowries for poor girls so that they could marry. For the slaves and the poor he was not only a nurse but an advocate, a counsellor, and a friend.
The animals. The popular memory of Martin is full of animals. The Order’s own tradition tells that he cared for sick dogs and cats in his sister’s house, and that he made a dog, a cat, and a mouse eat in peace from one dish. It tells that when the friars set out to poison the mice that were eating the linens of the sacristy, he went to the garden, called the mice out, and promised them food if they would stay away from the convent, and they obeyed. These stories are cherished, and they belong to a long tradition in the lives of the saints, from St. Jerome’s lion to St. Francis’s wolf. They should be received as traditio pia, the devotion of the faithful, rather than as history in the strict sense. But they express something true about him. His charity extended to every creature in which he saw the work of God’s hands, and the humblest creatures were the ones he noticed.
The wonders. The witnesses in his process attested to many marvels: healings, knowledge of hidden things, ecstasy in prayer, passing through locked doors. Some of them reported that he had been seen far from Lima while never leaving his convent, in Mexico, in Africa, or in the East, where he is said to have comforted Christian captives. These reports, like those of the animals, stand on testimony that the Church examined with care, but the Church did not canonise him for them. She canonised him for his heroic charity and humility. The wonders were signs of the friendship with God out of which that charity came.
VII. Prayer, penance, and friendship
Behind the work of the infirmary lay a severe interior life. Martin slept little, on a board or on the floor. He took the discipline three times each night, offering the first for his own sins, the second for sinners, and the third for the holy souls in Purgatory. He fasted constantly and ate almost nothing but bread and vegetables. He prayed for hours before the Blessed Sacrament and before the crucifix. The Passion of Christ was the centre of his devotion, and the friars sometimes found him in ecstasy before the image of the Crucified.
He loved Our Lady with the special devotion of a son of St. Dominic, and he prayed the Rosary without ceasing. He took a particular joy in serving the Mass. His charity for the holy souls, whom he remembered every night under the lash, makes him an apt companion for this first week of November.
He did not walk this road alone. Lima in his day was a city of saints. St. Turibius of Mogrovejo was its archbishop until 1606, and he may have confirmed the young Martin. St. Rose of Lima, a Dominican tertiary like him, lived in the city until her death in 1617, and the tradition of Lima has always held that the two knew and esteemed one another. St. Francis Solano, the Franciscan missionary, died there in 1610. And Martin’s closest friend in religion was St. John Macías, a Spanish lay brother at the Dominican convent of the Magdalena, who served as its porter and gave alms to the poor as Martin did. The two lay brothers met to pray together and to speak of God. Martin and John lie today, with St. Rose, in the Basilica of Santo Domingo in Lima.
VIII. Death and cultus
In the autumn of 1639 Martin fell ill with a fever, and he told his brethren that he would not recover. The city came to his bedside. The viceroy of Peru, the Count of Chinchón, came to kiss his hand and ask his blessing. The archbishop of Lima came as well. Martin was troubled by such honours and begged to be left in peace.
He received the last sacraments and asked the friars to pray the Creed aloud. The tradition of the convent records that he died as they reached the words Et homo factus est, “and was made man,” on the third of November, 1639. He was fifty-nine years old. The friars, the poor of the city, and the great of Lima crowded into Santo Domingo for his funeral, and the archbishop, the viceroy’s son, and noblemen of the city carried his body. Many took fragments of his habit as relics, and the Order had to provide him with fresh habits more than once before he was buried.
The process for his beatification began in Lima in 1660, under Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez. Clement XIII declared his virtues heroic in 1763. Gregory XVI beatified him in 1837. From then on the Order of Preachers kept his feast in its own calendar, and devotion to Blessed Martin spread across Latin America, to the United States, to Ireland, and to the missions of Africa and Asia. In 1939 the Peruvian government named him patron of social justice in Peru.
The two miracles approved for his canonisation came from opposite ends of the Spanish-speaking world. In 1948 an elderly woman in Paraguay, Dorotea Caballero Escalante, recovered from a grave intestinal obstruction after prayer to him. In 1956 a small boy in Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, Antonio Cabrera Pérez, was cured of a gangrenous injury to his leg that physicians expected would require amputation. John XXIII canonised him in St. Peter’s on the sixth of May, 1962.
In his homily on that day the Pope praised him, in substance, as a man who excused the faults of others, who forgave bitter injuries, who loved those whom the world despised, and who served the poor without counting the cost. The people of Lima had already given him a shorter title: Martín de la Caridad, Martin of Charity.
IX. What his life teaches
That God raises the lowly. The Psalm at the head of this entry was fulfilled in him to the letter. A boy whom his father would not name, whom the law barred from the habit, and who called himself by the names that others used to insult him, now stands among the princes of God’s people. Every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled; and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted (Luke 14:11). The proper oration of his feast in the Dominican rite asks precisely this: that God, who led him to heavenly glory by the road of humility, would grant us so to follow his example that we may be exalted with him in heaven.
That humiliation can be received as a gift. Martin suffered real injustice because of his birth and his colour. The Church does not pretend otherwise, and neither should we. But he did not let the contempt of others define him or embitter him. He united it to the humiliation of Christ, who emptied himself, taking the form of a servant (Phil. 2:7), and it became the material of his sanctity. The injustice remained an injustice. His answer to it was charity.
That charity sees every person. Martin saw the friars who despised him, the slaves whom Lima did not count, the abandoned children, the beggar covered in sores, the man bleeding in the street, and even the mice in the sacristy. He saw them because he looked at everyone as Christ looks at them. As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me (Matt. 25:40).
That charity and obedience are not enemies. When obedience and charity seemed to collide, Martin did not choose one and despise the other. He asked to be taught. His humility in obedience won him the liberty to serve. The saints show that the two virtues, rightly understood, converge, because both are the love of God.
That action flows from prayer. The infirmarian who never seemed to rest spent his nights before the crucifix and the tabernacle. His works of mercy were not a substitute for prayer. They were its overflow.
Practice
Examine. Whom do I fail to see? Is there a person or a class of persons, in my parish, my workplace, or my city, whom I pass by without noticing? Do I resent humiliations, or offer them to Christ? When I am slighted, do I answer with silence and kindness, or with a grievance? Is there a work of mercy that I have put off because it seemed unclean or inconvenient?
Do. Perform one of the corporal works of mercy today, deliberately and in person: visit someone sick, feed someone hungry, or give to the poor with your own hands rather than at a distance. Take on one humble task at home or at work that is usually left to others, and do it well, for God alone. If someone has insulted or slighted you, do that person a quiet kindness this week.
Pray. St. Martin has no Collect in the 1962 Missal for the universal Church. Pray instead the Collect of today’s Mass, which speaks of the bonds of sin from which Martin, by his nightly penances, begged release for sinners and for the holy souls:
Absolve, quæsumus, Domine, tuorum delicta populorum: ut a peccatorum nexibus, quæ pro nostra fragilitate contraximus, tua benignitate liberemur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the offences of Thy people: that by Thy bountiful goodness we may be set free from the bonds of the sins which we have contracted through our frailty. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Qui se humiliat, exaltabitur. “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”
Devote. It is the week of the holy souls. Offer one mortification today for the souls in Purgatory, as Martin offered his third discipline each night for them, and pray five decades of the Rosary for the dead whom no one remembers. Ask St. Martin to obtain for you the grace to see Christ in those whom the world overlooks.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets Martin beside the saints of colonial Lima, St. Rose, St. Turibius of Mogrovejo, St. Francis Solano, and St. John Macías, and beside the holy lay brothers and porters of the Church, St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, St. Conrad of Parzham, and St. Felix of Cantalice. The Church History path follows the evangelisation of Peru, the Dominicans in the Indies, and the long struggle of the Church against the abuses of the colonial order, from Montesinos and Las Casas to St. Peter Claver. The Theology and Doctrine path treats St. Thomas on humility (II-II, q. 161), on mercy (II-II, q. 30), and on almsgiving (II-II, q. 32). The Spiritual Practices path takes up the corporal works of mercy, penance offered for the holy souls, and devotion to the Passion.
Sancte Martine, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the acts of the process of beatification and canonisation (Lima, from 1660); the Roman Martyrology; the proper of the Order of Preachers; G. Cavallini, St. Martin de Porres, Apostle of Charity (St. Louis, 1963); J. C. Kearns, The Life of Blessed Martin de Porres (New York, 1937); Butler’s Lives of the Saints*; the homily of John XXIII at the canonisation, 6 May 1962. His own words, and the words of the canonisation homily, are given in paraphrase. The episodes of the sale, the beggar, the wounded man, the animals, and his bilocations are given as the tradition of the Order and of the process.*