St. Martin de Porres crossed a flooded river at Lima

LIMA, Viceroyalty of Peru, 1634 AD — The Rímac rose so high this year that it burst the wall built to hold it. The water wrecked much of the church of las Cabezas, a short distance from the bank. It came out on the side of the city where St. Martin de Porres grew up.

The boy from Malambo street

St. Martin de Porres was born in Lima in 1579 AD. His father was a Spanish gentleman, and his mother was a freed black woman from Panama. She lived on Malambo street, in the house of a woman who had given her a home. The two of them placed him with a barber so that he could learn the trade.

That side of the river was a neighbourhood called San Lázaro. It lay outside the city’s own boundary, and black and mixed-race families lived there, away from the streets at the centre of Lima.

Once he was working as a barber, he never asked anyone for the usual fee. Whatever people chose to give him, he handed on to the poor.

At fifteen he asked to join the Dominicans. The law in Peru would not let anyone whose family came from Africa or from the Indians join a religious order. But the prior of the Rosary had watched him work with a razor and with medicines. So he took him into the house as a donado. He lived like that for nine years before the Dominicans let him take vows. He is the barber of that convent now, and the sick there are in his care.

Three stones into the Rímac

He crossed the river and went to the church. The flood water was standing inside the building when he got there, and a crowd had come down to it. The people had the church’s images and its valuables in their arms, ready to carry them out. He would not let them take anything. He told them the river would do the church no more harm.

Then he left the crowd in the church and walked out to the river.

According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, he picked up three stones. He called on the Most Holy Trinity — the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He threw the first stone upstream, the second downstream and the third into the middle of the current. The river went back down into its channel at once, and it stayed inside it.