Feast day: November 3
St. Martin de Porres
Son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed African slave, barred from full religious life by his race, he became Lima's most beloved healer of people — and animals.
Martin de Porres was born at Lima, Peru, in 1579, the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a freed black woman from Panama. His father was at first ashamed of his dark-skinned children and largely abandoned them, and Martin grew up in poverty and on the margins of a society sharply divided by race — a wound he carried, and transformed, all his life.
Apprenticed to a barber-surgeon, he learned to cut hair, draw blood, and care for wounds, and at fifteen he asked to join the Dominicans at Lima. Because of his mixed race the law would not let him become a full friar, so he offered himself only as a lowly servant, a 'donado,' content to do the humblest work of the house. In time his holiness so overwhelmed the community that they set the rules aside and received him fully.
He became the friary's barber, infirmarian, and almoner, and his charity knew no boundary of race or class or even species. He nursed the sick of the city without distinction — Spanish nobles and African slaves, Indians and the poorest beggars alike — founded an orphanage and a children's hospital, and was so tender toward animals that he kept a shelter for stray dogs and cats at his sister's house. Stories gathered of his miracles, his bilocation, and his ecstasies.
Through it all he called himself only a 'poor slave' and a 'mulatto dog,' choosing always the lowest place. He died at Lima in 1639, mourned by the whole city. Canonized in 1962, the first black saint of the Americas, he is honored as a patron of social justice, of interracial harmony, and of all who are pushed to the margins.
He ran a hospital, an orphanage, and an animal shelter, and his confreres swore he could bilocate. Lima's racially excluded brother became its patron of justice.
Image: AnonymousUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
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