Saint Martin de Porres

That brother was Martin de Porres, rejected at birth by his own father for being of mixed race, and despised by colonial society as one of the lowest of the low.

Yet this man from the bottom of society became the great healer of Lima, a father to countless suffering people, and a living sign of a Christian love that breaks down every wall of color, race and class.

Though he grew up poor and despised in an unjust colonial society, young Martin showed a remarkably kind heart from early on. Whenever his mother gave him money to buy food at the market, he would give most of it away to starving beggars on the way, and then get a beating from his mother when he got home.

When Martin was eight, his father, after a long absence, came back and took the two children to Guayaquil, Ecuador, to raise them. But only a few years later, his father sent Martin back to Lima to his poor mother.

At twelve, Martin asked to be apprenticed in the shop of a barber-surgeon in the city. There he worked hard, learning to prepare herbal remedies, bandage wounds, pull teeth and practice basic medicine. With his skillful hands and compassionate heart he became a devoted assistant, who always put poor patients who could not pay first.

For nine long years, Martin did the lowliest jobs: sweeping the friary, scrubbing the latrines, washing the friars’ dirty clothes, working in the kitchen, and shaving his brothers and cutting their hair. The broom became his constant companion.

He did those humble tasks with joy and reverence, seeing Christ Himself in each of his brothers. When some hot-tempered young friars hurled insults at him, calling him a “mulatto dog”, Martin only smiled and bowed his head, considering himself fully deserving of those insults.

His charity did not stop at the friars; it spilled out into the streets of Lima. Every day he gave out food to hundreds of poor people, to Black slaves mistreated by their masters, and to Indigenous people worked to the bone. He turned his little cell into an emergency room for the sick.

When the superior, fearing contagion, strictly forbade him to bring sick people with sores from the street into the sleeping quarters of the friary, Martin obeyed and took them to his sister Juana’s house. But once he came upon a beggar with a contagious disease lying by the roadside, close to dying of cold. Martin risked everything, carried him in on his back and laid him in his own bed.

When the superior sternly rebuked him for disobeying, Brother Martin humbly replied with words straight from the Gospel:

“Forgive me, Father, for obedience is precious indeed, but charity toward those in need is far greater!”

The superior was moved, and from then on let him follow the promptings of charity freely.

Brother Martin’s kindness reached even the animals. He set up a place to care for injured stray dogs and cats, and fed old, worn-out donkeys turned out by their owners. Even the mice that chewed the books and altar breads were gently scolded and led to a corner of the garden of their own, where he fed them every day. The picture of Brother Martin feeding a dog, a cat and a mouse from the same dish has become a lovely image of the peace of God’s Kingdom.

He also founded the first orphanage and free school in Lima, named Santa Cruz, where hundreds of homeless, abandoned children were fed, taught and given an honest trade.

Many witnesses spoke of extraordinary gifts God gave him: being lifted into the air in ecstasy at prayer, reading souls, and bilocation, appearing in two places at once to comfort prisoners in North Africa or the dying thousands of miles away. Yet Brother Martin always thought of himself as the most useless sinner on earth.

In the autumn of 1639, at the age of sixty, Brother Martin fell gravely ill with fever and knew his time had come to go home to the Father. The whole city of Lima was shaken. Bishops, nobles and officials, slaves and ragged beggars, all streamed to the friary of the Holy Rosary to see their beloved father and brother one last time. The Viceroy of Peru himself came and knelt at his bedside, kissing the humble brother’s dark hand to ask for his blessing.

Pope Gregory XVI beatified him in 1837, and on May 6, 1962, Pope John XXIII canonized Martin de Porres. He was made patron of racial reconciliation, of social justice and of health workers. The Church celebrates him on November 3 each year.

In Vietnam, the image of “Saint Martin, the dark-skinned saint”, broom in hand, is found in almost every church. Poor working people find in him a friend who understands their hard lives.