Saint Martin de Porres, ten, confirmed as his father sails for Panama

LIMA, Peru, about 1590 AD — Saint Martin de Porres was confirmed at ten years old and left in Lima in his mother’s keeping. His father, don Juan de Porres, had been given the government of Panama and had to take ship for it. Before he sailed, don Juan arranged what he could for the boy: the sacrament, money in his mother’s hands to feed him and keep him at school, and the trade of barber once the schooling was done.

The father is a gentleman of Burgos and a knight of the Order of Alcántara. The mother, Ana Velázquez, is a freed woman born in Panama. The house she is raising her two children in is not her own: doña Francisca Vélez Miquel has taken the three of them into hers, on the street called Malambo.

St. Martin de Porres was born in Lima on December 9, 1579 AD, in a small house next door to the big house that stands opposite the church of the Espíritu Santo (the Holy Spirit). Children born in that street belonged to the parish of San Sebastián, and he was baptised there. The register of San Sebastián has the entry: “Wednesday, 9 December 1579, I baptised Martin, of a father not known, and of Ana Velazquez, free. The godparents were Juan de Huesca and Ana de Escurcena; Antonio Polanco signed it.”

Later don Juan had business in the city of St. James of Guayaquil. He took both children north with him, the boy and his sister Juana, and had them schooled there. With the master his father chose, St. Martin de Porres learned to read and write in a short time. In that city Captain Diego de Miranda, his father’s uncle, saw don Juan with the two children and asked who the mulatto children with him were. Don Juan answered him: “They are my children, and Ana Velazquez’s, and therefore I must support them and give them the education that belongs to them.”

Then he brought the boy back down the coast to Lima.

Confirmation perfects the grace of baptism and gives the Holy Spirit; in the Latin Church a child receives it once he has come to the age of reason, and the bishop is its ordinary minister. Don Juan had it done for his son before he sailed. The archbishop of Lima, St. Toribio Alfonso Mogrovejo, had been travelling the roads of his diocese for years, baptising and confirming nearly half a million people as he crossed it. On one of those journeys he confirmed St. Martin de Porres.

Then don Juan left the city for the coast. The road out of Lima runs nine miles to Callao, the harbour the city had grown up on. He took ship there for Panama, up the coast to the north, and the government waiting for him.

Ana Velázquez was left with the charge the boy’s father had given her: keep him at school, and when the schooling was finished put him to a trade. St. Martin de Porres stayed with her in the house on Malambo. She sent him out each day to buy the day’s food, and he gave part of it away to poor children.

When the schooling was done, Ana Velázquez and doña Francisca between them found the boy a master.

The university was closed to him: his parents had never married, and his mother was a freed woman of colour. The law gave the university’s degrees only to the direct and legitimate descendants of Spaniards, and it kept mulattos — the children of a Spanish and an African parent, as he was — off the university benches altogether.

The barber’s trade was open, and it was a skilled one. Four guilds practised the art of healing in Peru — physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and the barbers or bloodletters — and the barbers came last of the four. The city had already found it necessary to regulate them: an ordinance of 1559 AD forbade a barber to treat the sick without first producing his credentials, because patients were being endangered.

The master they found was a bloodletter as well as a barber. He taught St. Martin de Porres both trades: to shave and cut hair, to open a vein, and to treat wounds, ulcers and abscesses with the remedies of that time.