Martín de Porres

Saint Martín de Porres
Saint Martín de Porres
	Portrait of Saint Martín de Porres, circa 17th century, in the church of the Monastery of Santa Rosa de Lima. This portrait was painted during his lifetime or very shortly after his death, so it is probably the most faithful to his appearance.
The Saint of the Broom; Martín of Charity
Born	Juan Martín de Porres Velázquez; December 9, 1579; Lima, Viceroyalty of Peru, Spanish Empire
Died	November 3, 1639 (aged 59); Lima, Viceroyalty of Peru, Spanish Empire
Venerated in	Catholic Church; Lutheran Church; Anglican Church
Beatified	October 29, 1837 by Gregory XVI
Canonized	May 6, 1962 by John XXIII
Major shrine	Basilica and Convent of Santo Domingo, Lima, Peru
Feast	November 3
Attributes	Dog; Cat; Broom; Crucifix; Mouse; Dove
Patronage	See Patronages

Saint Martín de Porres Velázquez or Saint Martín de Porras Velázquez (December 9, 1579, Lima, Viceroyalty of Peru – November 3, 1639, ib.), whose secular name was Juan Martín de Porres Velázquez, was a friar of the Dominican order born in the Viceroyalty of Peru.

Martín de Porres was the first mulatto saint of America.^[1] He is also known as "the saint of the broom" because he is depicted with a broom in his hand as a symbol of his humility.

Biography

Childhood

Martín de Porres or Porras^[1]^[2] was the son of a nobleman from Burgos, a knight of the Order of Alcántara, Juan de Porras de Miranda, a native of the city of Burgos, and of a freed black woman, Ana Velázquez, a native of Panama who lived in Lima.

His father could not marry a woman of her condition, because she was very poor, which did not prevent his cohabitation with Ana Velázquez. From this relationship Martín was born and, two years later, Juana De Porres Velázquez, his only sister. Martín de Porres was baptized on December 9, 1579, in the Church of San Sebastián in Lima.

Ana Velázquez gave her two children a careful Christian upbringing. Juan de Porres was stationed in Guayaquil, and from there he provided for their support. Seeing the precarious situation in which they were growing up, without a father or teachers, he decided to acknowledge them as his children before the law. In his childhood and early adolescence he suffered the poverty and limitations typical of the black community in which he lived.^[1]

Religious life

He trained as a practical assistant, empirical physician, barber and herbalist.^[1] In 1594, at the age of fifteen, and at the invitation of Fray Juan de Lorenzana, a famous Dominican, theologian and man of virtue, he entered the Order of Saint Dominic de Guzmán in the category of "donado", that is, as a tertiary because he was an illegitimate son (he received lodging and was occupied in many tasks as a servant). He lived this way for nine years, performing the humblest duties. He was admitted as a brother of the order in 1603. He persevered in his vocation despite his father's opposition, and in 1606 he became a friar, professing the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Of all the virtues that Martín de Porres possessed, humility stood out; he always put others ahead of his own needs. On one occasion the Convent was in serious financial difficulty and the Prior found himself obliged to sell some valuable objects; in the face of this, Martín de Porres offered himself to be sold as a slave to help remedy the crisis, and the Prior, moved, refused his help. He constantly exercised his pastoral and missionary vocation; he taught Christian doctrine and the faith of Jesus Christ to the blacks and Indians and the rustic people who came to listen to him in the streets and on the haciendas near the properties of the Order located in Limatambo.

The situation of poverty and moral abandonment that they suffered worried him; thus, with the help of several wealthy people of the city—among them the Viceroy Luis Jerónimo Fernández de Cabrera y Bobadilla, 4th Count of Chinchón, who each month handed him no less than one hundred pesos with his own hand—he founded the Asylum and School of Santa Cruz to gather all the vagrants, orphans and beggars and help them escape their wretched situation.

Martín always aspired to carry out a missionary vocation in distant countries and provinces. He was often heard speaking of the Philippines, China and especially of Japan, a country he once claimed to know. The future saint was frugal, abstinent and vegetarian. He slept only two or three hours, mostly in the afternoons. He always wore a simple habit of white coarse woolen cloth (cordellate) with a long black cape. Once, when the Prior obliged him to accept a new habit and another friar laughingly congratulated him, Martín answered him: "well, they are to bury me in this one", and indeed, so it was.^[3]

Ideal of holiness

*Glorification of Saint Martín de Porres* by the Italian artist Fausto Conti, commissioned by Pope John XXIII for the canonization at Saint Peter's in Rome. It is currently in the Basilica of the Most Holy Rosary, in the Convent of Santo Domingo in Lima.

Martín was a follower of the models of holiness of Saint Dominic de Guzmán, Saint Joseph, Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Vincent Ferrer. However, despite his ardent fervor and devotion, he did not develop a line of mysticism of his own.

Martín de Porres was the confidant of Saint Juan Macías, a Dominican friar, with whom he forged a close friendship. It is known that he also met Saint Rose of Lima, a Dominican tertiary, and that they spoke with each other a few times, but there are no historically verified details of these meetings.

Martín's charismatic personality led him to be sought out by people from all social strata, high dignitaries of the Church and of the Government, simple people, rich and poor; all found in Martín relief for their spiritual, physical or material needs. His complete willingness and his unconditional help to his neighbor led him to be seen as a holy man.

Although he tried to keep out of sight, his fame as a saint grew day by day. There were several families in Lima who received help from Martín de Porres in one way or another. Also, the first thing many sick people asked for when they felt gravely ill was: "Let the holy brother Martín come." And he never refused a favor to anyone when he was able to do it.

His death

At almost sixty years of age, Martín de Porres fell ill and announced that the hour had come to meet the Lord. The news caused deep commotion in the city of Lima. Such was the veneration for this mulatto that the Viceroy Luis Jerónimo Fernández de Cabrera y Bobadilla went to kiss his hand while he lay on his deathbed, asking him to watch over him from heaven.

Martín asked the grieving religious to recite the Creed aloud, and while they were doing so, he died. It was 9 o'clock at night on November 3, 1639, in the City of the Kings, capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The whole city bade him a last farewell in a massive gathering in which people of all social classes mingled. High civil and ecclesiastical authorities carried him on their shoulders to the crypt, the bells tolled in his name, and popular devotion proved so excessive that the authorities were forced to carry out a hasty burial.

Today his remains rest in the Basilica and Convent of Santo Domingo in Lima, alongside the remains of Saint Rose of Lima and Saint Juan Macías, in the so-called "Altar of the Saints of Peru".

Attributed miracles

Image of Saint Martín de Porres in the Barranco District.

The stories of his miracles are many and astonishing; they were collected as sworn testimonies in the diocesan (1660–1664) and apostolic (1679–1686) Processes opened to promote his beatification. A good part of these testimonies come from the very Dominican religious who lived with him, but there are also some from many other people, since Martín de Porres dealt with people of all social classes.

He is credited with the gift of bilocation. Without leaving Lima, he is said to have been seen in Mexico, in Africa, in China and in Japan, encouraging missionaries who were in difficulty or healing the sick. While he remained shut in his cell, he was seen arriving at the bedside of certain dying people to console or heal them. Many saw him enter and leave enclosures while the doors were shut. On occasion he would leave the convent to attend to a gravely ill person, and then return inside without having a key to the door and without anyone opening it for him. Asked how he did it, he would answer: "I have my ways of coming in and going out."

He was reputed to have control over nature; the plants he sowed germinated ahead of time and all kinds of animals obeyed his commands. One of the best-known episodes of his life is that he made a dog, a mouse and a cat eat from the same dish in complete harmony. He was also credited with the gift of healing, of which many testimonies remain, the most extraordinary being the healing of sick people who had been given up for lost. "I treat you, God heals you" was the phrase he used to say to avoid shows of veneration toward his person.

According to the testimonies of the time, sometimes these were instantaneous cures; at other times his mere presence was enough for a patient given up for lost to begin a surprising and steady process of recovery. Normally the remedies he prescribed were those indicated for the case, but on other occasions, when he did not have them, he resorted to implausible means with the same results. With some bandages and warm wine he healed a child who had broken both legs, and by applying a piece of shoe sole to a shoemaker's arm he cured him of a serious infection.

Many testimonies stated that when he prayed with great devotion, he levitated and neither saw nor heard people. Sometimes the Viceroy himself, who came to consult him (even though Martín had little schooling), had to wait a good while at the door of his room for his ecstasy to end. Another of the faculties attributed to him was clairvoyance. He would often appear before the poor and the sick bringing them certain foods, medicines or objects that they had not requested but that they secretly wished for or needed.

It was also told, among other events, that Juana, his sister, having secretly taken a sum of money from her husband, met Martín, who immediately reproached her for what she had done. He was also credited with faculties to foretell his own life and the lives of others, including the moment of death.

From the accounts preserved of his miracles, it seems to follow that Martín de Porres did not give them much importance. Sometimes, even, when imposing silence about them, he used to do so with jovial jokes, full of wit and humility. In the life of Martín de Porres, miracles seemed like natural works. It is said that at some moments of his life he had to contend with the Devil; especially on the day of his death, when the devil allegedly ended up being defeated.^[1]^[4]

Beatification and canonization

In 1660 the Archbishop of Lima, Pedro de Villagómez, began collecting statements on the virtues and miracles of Martín de Porres to promote his beatification, but despite his exemplary life and having become a fundamental devotion of mulattoes, Indians and blacks, colonial society did not raise him to the altars. His beatification process was to last until 1837, when he was beatified by Pope Gregory XVI.

Pope John XXIII, who felt a true devotion for Martín de Porres, canonized him in Vatican City on May 6, 1962, before a crowd of forty thousand people from various parts of the world, naming him "Holy Patron of Social Justice" and extolling his virtues with the following words: "Martín excused the faults of others. He forgave the bitterest insults, convinced that he deserved greater punishments for his sins. He sought with all his heart to encourage those burdened by their own faults, comforted the sick, provided clothing, food and medicine to the poor, helped peasants, blacks and mulattoes who were then held as slaves. The people call him 'Martín, the good'."

The proclamation of Martín de Porres as a saint was supported by the miraculous cures of a gravely ill elderly woman in Asunción (Paraguay) in 1948 and of a child whose leg was about to be amputated because of gangrene, in Tenerife (Spain) in 1956.^[5]^[6]

His feast in the Catholic calendar of saints is celebrated on November 3, the date of his death. In various cities of Peru, patronal festivals are held in his name and processions of his image take place on that day, the main procession being the one that departs from the Church of Santo Domingo in Lima, where his mortal remains rest.

Cult in the United States

During the 20th century, the cult of Fray Martín de Porres gained great importance among the black population of the United States. Catholics of African and enslaved descent identified him as a person who demonstrated the universality of the Catholic Church, and promoted the cult within their own communities.^[7] As Gustave B. Aldrich commented in 1930 in the magazine The Chronicle, of the Federated Colored Catholics, "The representation of black saints and great men of faith in our colored Catholic churches will do much to rehabilitate our self-respect."^[8]