Infirma mundi elegit Deus, ut confundat fortia. “The weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong.” (1 Cor. 1:27)
I. The porter of Alcalá
St. Didacus is one of the most widely honoured saints of the Spanish world, and one of the least known. A city on the Pacific coast of North America bears his name, and so do missions, towns and churches from California to the Philippines. Annibale Carracci painted his life on the walls of a chapel in Rome; Zurbarán and Murillo painted him in Seville; Lope de Vega wrote a play about him. And yet in his own lifetime he was nobody. He was never ordained. He held no office of importance, except once and briefly, on an island at the end of the known world. He spent most of his religious life answering the door of a friary, working in its kitchen and garden, and giving bread to the poor.
That is the first thing to understand about him, and it is also the first difficulty. Because he was obscure, very little was written about him while he lived. The record of his life comes almost entirely from the process of his canonization, opened a century after his death, when the witnesses who had known him were long dead and the stories told about him at Alcalá, Seville and in the Canaries had been passing from mouth to mouth for three generations. The lives written for and after the canonization drew on that process. Modern historians have rightly noted how much of this material is the stuff of popular memory. What follows rests on what the record will bear. Where a story belongs to the pious tradition of his cult, it is given as such.
But it is worth saying at the outset that the thinness of the record is not an embarrassment. It is, in a sense, the point. The Church raised to her altars a man of whom almost nothing was known except that he had been humble, poor, charitable to the sick and the hungry, and devoted to the Cross. She did it deliberately, at a moment of great consequence, and she gave him a Collect which says exactly why.
II. San Nicolás del Puerto
Didacus, in Spanish Diego, was born about the year 1400 at San Nicolás del Puerto, a small village in the hills of the Sierra Norte, north of Seville. His parents were poor and of no family. Of his childhood the record tells almost nothing. In religion he was later called Diego de San Nicolás, after his village, as was the custom among the friars. The world calls him Diego de Alcalá, after the town where he died.
As a young man he went to live with a hermit priest near his village, and he lived for some years in the hermit’s way, praying, fasting, and supporting himself by working with his hands. The tradition says that he cultivated a little garden and wove baskets and mats of rush and palm, and that what he did not need for himself he gave to the poor. It was a life with no witnesses and no ambitions. It was also the school of everything that came after: prayer joined to manual work, poverty chosen freely, and charity to whoever came to the door.
III. A lay brother of the Observance
In time Didacus asked to be received among the Friars Minor. He was clothed at the friary of Arrizafa, outside Córdoba, a house of the Observance.
The word needs a little explanation. By the end of the fourteenth century, many Franciscan houses had relaxed the strict poverty that St. Francis had required of his sons. A movement of reform had arisen within the order, which called itself the Observance because it sought to observe the Rule of St. Francis as it was written. In Didacus’s lifetime the Observance was at the height of its fervour. In Italy it was led by St. Bernardine of Siena and St. John of Capistrano; in Spain it spread through a network of small, poor friaries, many of them in remote places. The Observant friars went barefoot or in sandals, begged for their food, owned nothing, and gave themselves to preaching, prayer and the service of the poor. Didacus entered one of these houses, and he was formed in their spirit.
He entered as a lay brother. A lay brother in a Franciscan friary was a friar in the full sense, bound by the same vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as the priests, but he was not ordained and was not destined for ordination. He did not preach in the churches or hear confessions. His work was to keep the house: to cook, to clean, to tend the garden, to care for the sick brothers, to answer the door, and to go out with the wallet and beg for the community’s bread. Didacus could have studied for the priesthood. He did not, and he never asked to. He stayed a lay brother for the rest of his life.
IV. The Canary Islands
In the early 1440s, Didacus was sent with a group of Observant friars to the Canary Islands. The islands lie off the coast of Africa, some seven hundred miles southwest of Spain. In the first decades of the fifteenth century the Castilian crown had begun to conquer them, island by island, from their native inhabitants. Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and El Hierro had been subdued; Gran Canaria, Tenerife and La Palma had not.
It was a mission in a hard place, and a morally troubled one. The conquest of the Canaries was accompanied by raids in which the native islanders, including those who had been baptized, were seized and sold as slaves. The Church had already spoken against it. In January 1435 Pope Eugene IV, in the bull Sicut dudum, condemned the enslavement of the Canary islanders, commanded that all who had been taken be set free within fifteen days, and laid excommunication on those who refused. The friars who went to the islands went as missionaries to a people who had good reason to distrust Christians.
Didacus served first on Lanzarote and then on Fuerteventura, where the Observants had founded a small friary dedicated to St. Bonaventure. In 1445 his superiors made him guardian of that house, its superior, an office rarely given to a lay brother. He held it until about 1449.
Later accounts of these years praise his zeal for the conversion of the islanders and his gentleness toward them. The tradition says that he longed to cross to Gran Canaria, which was still unconquered, to preach the Gospel there even at the cost of his life, and that the attempt came to nothing. The tradition of Fuerteventura also remembers him, with his companion Fray Juan de Santorcaz, as the finder of the image of Our Lady venerated there as the Virgen de la Peña, now the patroness of the island. Historians have noted that the documentary evidence for these years is slight, and that the later lives may have made more of his missionary work than the record can support. What is certain is that he went, that he served, and that his brothers trusted him enough to set him over them. For a lay brother on a frontier mission, that is not nothing.
V. The plague at the Aracoeli
In 1449 Didacus was recalled to Spain. The next year, 1450, was a Jubilee. Pope Nicholas V had proclaimed a Holy Year, and on the feast of Pentecost he was to canonize St. Bernardine of Siena, the great preacher of the Observance, who had died only six years before. Friars Minor came to Rome from every province of the order to be present. Didacus went with them, in the company of a priest of his province, Fray Alonso de Castro.
The Franciscans in Rome lodged at their great friary of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, on the Capitol. The city was full to bursting with pilgrims, and in the summer heat an epidemic broke out among the friars crowded into the convent. The Aracoeli became a hospital. Didacus was put in charge of the infirmary, and he stayed there for about three months, nursing the sick and the dying.
The later lives tell of cures he worked there, by making the sign of the cross over the sick, and of food that did not run out when there seemed to be nothing left to give them. These stories belong to the tradition of his cult. What lies beneath them is not in doubt: a lay brother from the edge of Christendom, in a city he did not know, among men who spoke other tongues, spent a summer at the bedsides of the plague-stricken, when every instinct of prudence would have told him to keep away. In the Rome of the Jubilee, which had come to see a great saint canonized, a small one was quietly being made.
VI. The door of the friary
Didacus returned to Spain and spent some years at the friary of La Salceda in New Castile, a house of the Observance famous for its austerity. From about 1456 he lived at Alcalá de Henares, in the friary of Santa María de Jesús, which the Archbishop of Toledo, Alonso Carrillo, had founded for the Observants not long before. He remained there until his death, and it was there that he became the saint the Church remembers.
His office at Alcalá was that of porter. The porter of a friary was the brother at the door. He received visitors, answered the bell at all hours, and, above all, met the poor. In fifteenth-century Spain the friary door was one of the few places where the hungry could always count on something to eat, and the porter was the one who gave it. Didacus gave bread and soup to whoever came, and he gave generously, often more generously than his superiors thought the house could afford. He also visited and cared for the sick of the town. The witnesses of the canonization process remembered him chiefly as the brother who fed the poor and nursed the sick.
Around this work the popular memory gathered a number of stories. The best known is that of the roses. One day, the story goes, the guardian of the friary met Didacus on his way to the door with his habit gathered up in front of him, and asked what he was carrying. Didacus opened his habit, and instead of the bread he had taken for the poor, it was full of roses. The same story is told of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and of other saints, and it is given here as the tradition of his cult. Zurbarán painted it, and the roses became Didacus’s emblem. Another story tells that he healed the sick by anointing them with oil from the lamp that burned before an image of Our Lady. Another, set at Seville, tells of a boy who hid from his mother’s anger in a baker’s oven, fell asleep there, and was found unharmed after the oven was lit, through the prayers of Didacus. These are the stories that the painters loved and that the people told. They are not history in the strict sense. But they are a faithful portrait of the man the people remembered: one in whose hands bread became something beautiful, in whose presence the sick were comforted, and whom mothers trusted with their children.
Of his inner life the tradition says three things above all. He loved the Cross, and was often found absorbed in prayer before the crucifix. He loved Our Lady, and his healing oil came from her lamp. And he was so given to prayer that he sometimes fell into ecstasy in the kitchen or the garden. The lives tell of a day when the brothers came to the refectory and found nothing prepared, and Didacus rapt in prayer before the fire; and of another when the food was found ready all the same. Here again the details belong to tradition. The substance is the life of a lay brother who did humble work all day long and prayed while he did it.
VII. Dulce lignum
In the autumn of 1463, Didacus fell ill with a fever and an abscess in his arm. He was an old man by the measure of his time, somewhere past sixty. When he knew that he was dying, he asked his brothers for a worn and patched habit, one that no one else would want, so that he could die as a poor man, as he had lived. He asked for a cord, and for forgiveness from the brothers he had lived with.
When the end came, he asked for the crucifix. He took it in his hands and looked at it, and he said over it the words that the Church sings on Good Friday at the Adoration of the Cross, from the hymn of Venantius Fortunatus:
Dulce lignum, dulces clavos, dulce pondus sustinet. “Sweet the wood, and sweet the nails, and sweet the weight it bears.”
Then he died. It was the night of the twelfth of November, 1463. He was buried in the friary church.
The tradition of his cult holds that his body was not buried at once, because of the crowds that came to see it; that it gave off a sweet fragrance; and that when it was exhumed some months later, it was found incorrupt. It remains at Alcalá to this day, in the Cathedral-Magistral of the Holy Children Justus and Pastor, where it is shown to the faithful on his feast. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and his cult grew up at once among the people of Alcalá and Castile, long before Rome took any notice of it.
VIII. Don Carlos and the canonization
A century later, his tomb was the scene of the event that brought him to the altars.
In the spring of 1562, Don Carlos, the only son of King Philip II and heir to the Spanish throne, was studying at Alcalá. In April he fell down a staircase in the archbishop’s palace and struck his head. The wound became infected, and he grew worse day by day. The best physicians of Spain were brought to his bedside, among them the great anatomist Andreas Vesalius, and his skull was opened to relieve the infection. Nothing seemed to help. He lost his sight and fell into delirium, and he was expected to die.
The people of Alcalá brought the body of the lay brother Didacus, in procession, from the friary to the palace, and laid it beside the prince’s bed. According to the account given in the canonization process, Don Carlos afterwards said that Didacus had appeared to him in a dream, in the Franciscan habit with a cross of reeds in his hand, and had told him that he would not die. From that night he began to recover.
It must be said plainly that the physicians had been treating him all the while, and that it is impossible now to say what part their treatment played. It must also be said that the story of Don Carlos did not end well. In the years that followed he grew increasingly unstable, violent and estranged from his father, and in 1568 Philip had him confined, and he died in confinement that same year, at the age of twenty-three. None of this diminishes what happened at Alcalá in 1562. But it is a reminder that the saints do not guarantee happy endings in this world, and that a miracle is a gift, not a reward.
Philip II was convinced that his son had been saved by the lay brother’s intercession, and he asked Rome to canonize him. Pope Pius IV opened the cause. It moved slowly through the pontificates of St. Pius V and Gregory XIII, and the commissions that examined the witnesses gathered the stories that the people of Alcalá, Seville and the Canaries told about him. It was finally brought to completion by Sixtus V, himself a Franciscan, who canonized Didacus in St. Peter’s in July 1588. The day is given in the sources as either the second or the tenth of that month.
The canonization was an event of real consequence. No saint had been canonized since 1523. For sixty-five years, through the whole first storm of the Protestant revolt, while the Reformers denounced the cult of the saints as idolatry, Rome had raised no one to the altars. Didacus was the first saint canonized after the Council of Trent, and the first after Sixtus V had reorganized the government of the Church earlier that same year and created the Sacred Congregation of Rites to oversee such causes. He was also the first lay brother of the Friars Minor to be canonized. When the Church at last resumed the solemn proclamation of saints, in the face of those who denied that the saints could intercede at all, the first saint she proclaimed was not a theologian or a bishop or a founder, but a porter who had fed the poor.
IX. San Diego
The cult spread through the Spanish world with the friars. In 1602 the Spanish banker Juan Enríquez de Herrera, whose son had been healed through the saint’s intercession, built a chapel in his honour in the Spanish national church in Rome, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, and commissioned Annibale Carracci to decorate it with scenes from his life. The frescoes, painted with Carracci’s pupils, show Didacus receiving the habit, giving alms, preaching, and saving the boy in the oven. The chapel was dismantled in the nineteenth century, and the frescoes are now divided between the Prado in Madrid and the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona; the altarpiece, in which Didacus presents Herrera’s son to Christ, remains in Rome, in Santa Maria in Monserrato.
In the same year, 1602, the explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno, sailing north along the Pacific coast of New Spain, anchored in a great natural harbour in early November and named it San Diego, in honour of the saint whose feast was at hand and of his own flagship, which bore the saint’s name. A hundred and sixty-seven years later, in July 1769, St. Junípero Serra, a Franciscan priest, founded on that bay the first of the missions of Alta California, and called it San Diego de Alcalá. The city that grew up around it still bears the name of the lay brother.
In the 1962 calendar the feast of St. Didacus is kept on the thirteenth of November, III classis, the day after his death, since the twelfth is the feast of St. Martin I. The Mass is Justus ut palma, of the Common of Confessors not Bishops, in white vestments. But the Church gave him a proper Collect, and a proper Epistle and Gospel, and chose them with care. The Epistle is St. Paul’s description of the apostles as a spectacle to the world, fools for Christ’s sake, the refuse of the world and the offscouring of all (1 Cor. 4:9-14). The Gospel is Our Lord’s word to the little flock: fear not, sell what you possess and give alms, lay up a treasure in heaven that faileth not (Luke 12:32-34). The Collect gives thanks to God, who chooses the weak things of the world to confound the strong.
X. What his life teaches
That God chooses the weak things of the world. St. Paul says that God chose the foolish, the weak, the base and the contemptible, the things that are not, to bring to nought the things that are, “that no flesh should glory in his sight” (1 Cor. 1:27-29). The Church canonized Didacus at the very moment when the strong things of the world were tearing Christendom apart, and she said, in effect, that this is what holiness looks like. It does not depend on learning, or rank, or achievement. It depends on God, who is pleased to work through those who have nothing to boast of.
That humility is not pretending to be nothing. Didacus did not affect a humility he did not have. When his superiors made him guardian on Fuerteventura, he obeyed and governed. When they made him porter at Alcalá, he obeyed and answered the door. St. Thomas teaches that humility is the virtue by which a man does not reach above himself, but holds himself subject to God, and to others for God’s sake (Summa Theologiæ II-II, q. 161). Didacus stood in the truth about himself before God, in whatever place he was put, and he did not ask for a higher one.
That the poor at the door are Christ. “As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40). Didacus spent his life at the door where the poor came, and he gave them more than prudence would have allowed. The story of the roses says, in the language of wonder, what the Gospel says plainly: that what is given to the poor for Christ’s sake becomes, in the sight of God, something beautiful, and is laid up as a treasure in heaven.
That the sick have a claim on us. In Rome in 1450, Didacus went into the plague-house when he could have kept away, and at Alcalá he visited the sick of the town. To visit the sick is a corporal work of mercy, and it is often the one we find easiest to neglect, because it costs time and comfort and sometimes courage. The Church sets before us a saint who did not neglect it.
That small work can be prayer. Didacus cooked, cleaned, gardened, begged, and answered the door, and the tradition remembers him as a contemplative. St. Augustine, writing against monks who thought manual labour beneath them, said that the hands can work while the heart prays, as craftsmen sing at their benches (De opere monachorum 17). Most Christians spend most of their lives in small and repetitive tasks. Didacus shows that these tasks are not an obstacle to union with God. They can be the very place of it.
That the Cross is sweet to those who love it. Didacus died with the crucifix in his hands, calling its wood and its nails sweet. That is not the language of a man who has never suffered. It is the language of a man who has looked at the Cross long enough to see what it is: the place where God gave everything for him. Mihi autem absit gloriari, nisi in cruce Domini nostri Iesu Christi: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal. 6:14).
Practice
Examine. Do I despise small and hidden work, at home or at my job, as beneath me? Do I want to be noticed and thanked for what I do? When the poor ask me for something, do I find reasons not to give, or do I give grudgingly and as little as I can? When someone I know is sick, do I visit them, call them, or pray for them, or do I let it pass because it is inconvenient? Do I let my work crowd out prayer, or do I offer my work to God and pray while I do it? When I look at the crucifix, do I see only suffering, or do I see love?
Do. Give an alms today, from what you would otherwise have kept, and if you can, give it in person, with a word and a look, to someone who asks. Visit, call or write to someone who is sick. Do one task today that no one will see or thank you for, carefully and well, and offer it to God as Didacus offered his work at the friary door. Since it is Friday, keep the Friday abstinence or the penance you have taken in its place, in union with the Passion of Our Lord.
Pray. The Collect of the feast:
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui dispositione mirabili infirma mundi eligis, ut fortia quæque confundas: concede propitius humilitati nostræ; ut piis beati Didaci Confessoris tui precibus, ad perennem in cælis gloriam sublimari mereamur. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“Almighty and everlasting God, who by a wonderful disposition choosest the weak things of the world, to confound whatsoever things are strong: mercifully grant to our lowliness, that by the loving prayers of blessed Didacus, Thy Confessor, we may deserve to be raised up to everlasting glory in heaven. 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. Dulce lignum, dulces clavos, dulce pondus sustinet. “Sweet the wood, and sweet the nails, and sweet the weight it bears.”
Devote. Friday belongs to the Passion. Spend a few minutes today before a crucifix, as Didacus did, and look at it until you begin to understand why he called the wood sweet. Make the Stations of the Cross if you can. Ask St. Didacus to obtain for you a love of hidden work, a generous heart toward the poor, and the courage to go to the sick. Commend to him the sick of your family and parish, and all who keep the doors of religious houses, parishes and shelters, where the poor still come.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path sets St. Didacus among the great lay brothers of the Franciscan family, from St. Paschal Baylon to St. Felix of Cantalice and St. Conrad of Parzham, all of them porters, beggars, or cooks, and beside the saints of the Observance, St. Bernardine of Siena, at whose canonization he was present, and St. John of Capistrano. The Church History path follows the Observant reform of the Franciscan order, the conquest and evangelization of the Canary Islands and Eugene IV’s condemnation of the slave trade there, and the long silence in canonizations from 1523 to 1588 that Didacus’s cause brought to an end. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up voluntary poverty, almsgiving, the visiting of the sick, and the sanctification of manual work. The Sacred Liturgy path turns to the Good Friday Adoration of the Cross and the hymn of Venantius Fortunatus from which Didacus took his last words.
Sancte Didace, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Holy Scriptures in the Douay-Rheims version with the Vulgate; the Roman Breviary and Missal for 13 November; the Roman Martyrology for 12 November; the bull Sicut dudum of Eugene IV (1435); the acts of the canonization of St. Didacus (1588) and the lives written from them; the Acta Sanctorum*, November; St. Augustine,* De opere monachorum*; St. Thomas Aquinas,* Summa Theologiæ II-II, q. 161; the hymn Pange lingua gloriosi of Venantius Fortunatus; Butler’s Lives of the Saints*; the Catholic Encyclopedia; L. J. Andrew Villalon, “The Fragility of Historical Memory: In Pursuit of the Career and Canonization of San Diego de Alcalá.” The finding of the Virgen de la Peña, the attempt on Gran Canaria, the cures at the Aracoeli, the roses, the healing oil, the boy in the oven, the ecstasies in the kitchen, and the incorruption of the body are given as the tradition of the cult.*