Martin de Porres, Seen in Two Places at Once

I made Martin in Lima out of exactly the union colonial society had built its whole caste system to prevent from being honored: a Spanish knight, Juan de Porres, and Ana Velázquez, a freed woman of African and possibly indigenous descent. His father, ashamed at first, would not acknowledge him; his birth certificate listed him for years as a child of unknown father. I want that fact left in the record, not softened, because everything Martin became, he became from underneath a society that had already decided, before he did a single thing, that he was worth less than the men around him. I do not build My saints exclusively from privilege. Sometimes I build them, deliberately, from exactly what a given century has despised.

He apprenticed as a barber-surgeon as a boy, which in that century meant learning to set bones, bleed patients, and dispense medicine, and I let that trade become the seed of something larger. At fifteen he asked to join the Dominican community of Santo Domingo el Real in Lima, and colonial law at the time barred men of his ancestry from full religious profession, so he entered instead as a donado, a lay servant attached to the convent, sweeping floors and tending the infirmary. He did that willingly for years before the friars, unable any longer to ignore what they were watching, admitted him to full religious profession as a Dominican brother in 1603. I did not need him to hold rank to work through him. I needed him willing, and he never once stopped being that.

What I gave him in that infirmary went past ordinary nursing. I let him heal the sick — Spanish colonists, enslaved and freed Africans, indigenous Peruvians, whoever came through the convent's doors — with a directness witnesses at the time struggled to explain by medicine alone, and I let him do it without once sorting his patients by the color that Lima sorted everyone else by. He built a shelter for orphaned and abandoned children, raised funds for dowries the way Nicholas of Myra once had, and established what amounted to one of the first pediatric and foundling hospitals in the Americas. He would not let the convent's cats and dogs go hungry either, feeding vermin in a spare room rather than have them killed, and the accounts of a mouse, a dog, and a cat eating peaceably from the same dish under his hand are not embellishment invented later — they come from testimony gathered close to his own lifetime, because he treated creation itself, not only the human part of it, as worth his mercy.

And I let him be seen where his body was not. Missionaries returning from Africa, from Japan, from China, from Mexico, gave sworn testimony in the years after his death that they had encountered him — comforting prisoners, tending plague victims, present and speaking to them — on the same days witnesses in Lima could account for him being physically present in the convent. I do not owe geography an explanation when I choose to let a soul this surrendered move beyond the ordinary limits of a body. I let it happen for Alphonsus Rodríguez and later for Padre Pio in their own centuries; I let it happen for Martin first, among the earliest well-attested cases the Americas produced.

He died on November 3, 1639, in the same convent where he had first been let in only as a servant, and the crowds that came to his deathbed and funeral — nobles and slaves together, weeping in the same room — were, in their way, the truest miracle of his life: a city built entirely on rank had, for one funeral, forgotten how to sort itself.

The Record

Martin de Porres was born December 9, 1579, in Lima, Peru, to Juan de Porres, a Spanish nobleman, and Ana Velázquez, a freed woman of African descent. Barred by colonial-era restrictions from full religious profession because of his mixed ancestry, he entered the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo el Real in Lima as a donado (lay servant) around 1594, and was admitted to full profession as a Dominican brother in 1603.

He served for decades in the convent infirmary and in charitable works throughout Lima, founding an orphanage and a facility for abandoned children, and was widely reported by contemporaries for healings and for bilocation — appearances reported by missionaries in distant regions including Africa and Asia coinciding with his documented presence in Lima, testimony gathered during the beatification process. He died November 3, 1639, in Lima.

He was beatified on October 29, 1837, by Pope Gregory XVI, and canonized on May 6, 1962, by Pope John XXIII, becoming one of the first saints of African descent canonized from the Americas. His canonization process examined numerous testimonies of healings and other reported phenomena gathered from witnesses in Lima and from missionaries abroad in the decades following his death. He is patron of interracial harmony, barbers, public health workers, and Peru, and is venerated throughout Latin America as a champion of the poor. Feast day: November 3.