Saint Martin de Porres

St. Martin de Porres was born on December 9, 1579 AD in a small house in Lima, next to the large house that faces the church of the Holy Spirit. He was baptised that same Wednesday in the parish of San Sebastián, at the font that would receive St. Rose of Lima a few years later. His father, don Juan de Porres, would not sign the entry, so it names only his mother, Ana Velázquez, a freed woman born in Panama.

Sent out each day to buy what the house needed, he gave part of the food to poor children in the street. His mother scolded and struck him for it, and once left him without his own dinner.

St. Martin de Porres was about eight when his father took him and his sister Juana to Guayaquil, where don Juan had business of the crown. There he learned to read and write with a master his father chose.

In that city his father's uncle, captain don Diego de Miranda, asked who the mulatto children travelling with him were. Don Juan named both children as his own again in the will he made at the hour of his death. Before sailing to take up the government of Panama, he had his son confirmed and left him with Ana Velázquez, charging her to set him to a barber's trade.

His mother placed him with a barber on Malambo street who was also a bloodletter. The man taught him the razor and the remedies then used for wounds, ulcers and abscesses. Barbers in Lima commonly practised medicine and surgery without credentials, and the city council decreed in 1559 AD that none should treat patients without first showing his titles.

Once qualified, St. Martin de Porres asked no fee, and set aside for the poor whatever anyone paid him. The almsgiving left him too poor to light his room, so he asked the lady of the house for a piece of candle, and she saw him through the cracks of the door kneeling before a crucifix in tears. Witnesses examined at Lima fifty years after his death said the lemon tree he had planted in that garden as a boy still stood and still bore fruit in every season.

At fifteen St. Martin de Porres gave in his name to the Order of Preachers as a donado, a lay tertiary attached to the convent of the Most Holy Rosary. Peruvian law then barred the descendants of Africans and of Indians from full membership of a religious order, and he asked for the most humble condition the house could give. The prior received him after seeing his skill as a barber and in medicine.

He remained nine years a donado bound by no vows. On June 2, 1603 AD, at twenty-four, he was admitted to solemn profession of the three vows, a thing then very rarely granted to a donado.

The infirmary of the convent of the Rosary was put into his hands, and he worked there as barber, surgeon and infirmarian. He had studied surgery as a youth and practised it free of charge for the poor of the city.

The provincial, Fr. Agustín Vega, forbade him to treat anyone inside the convent, and one night he carried a wounded man to his own cell. Called to account for it, St. Martin de Porres defended himself in a single sentence.

Friars of the convent abused him for his colour, and told him he belonged in a prison rather than a religious house. The black workers of the estate at Limatambo knew him by the blood he left in the olive grove where he scourged himself.

When the house had no money for the infirmary, he went to the prior and offered himself for sale as a slave. The prior wept and sent him away, saying God had already relieved the need.

In his last illness animals were killed on the physicians' orders to make remedies for him, and he asked them to stop. He received Viaticum and the last sacraments, in the sixtieth year of his age.

The community of the convent of the Rosary gathered round him and chanted the prayers of the rite. He let the image of his Redeemer fall on his breast and died at about nine in the evening of November 3, 1639 AD.

Two years after his death the Dominican province of Peru entered an act in his praise, and the Order's general chapter carried his obituary in 1642 AD. The Ordinary of Lima opened the judicial process in 1660 AD with seventy-five witnesses. On a March night in 1664 AD his bones were lifted before the Viceroy of Peru, and physicians who examined the body from head to foot found no sign of corruption.

Pope Gregory XVI beatified him in the Vatican basilica on October 29, 1837 AD. Pope John XXIII canonized him in Saint Peter's Basilica on May 6, 1962 AD, and the homily he preached that day is read in the Office on November 3.