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St. Martin de Porres
00:19:31
Saint Martin de Porres (1579–1639) was a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican Order renowned for his profound humility, charity, and dedication to the marginalized. Born in Lima to a Spanish nobleman and a freed African slave, he faced societal discrimination due to his mixed-race heritage. Despite these challenges, Martin devoted his life to serving others, working as a barber-surgeon, caring for the sick, and establishing an orphanage and hospital for abandoned children. He was known for his deep spirituality and was attributed with miraculous abilities, including healing and bilocation. Canonized in 1962, he is the patron saint of social justice, racial harmony, and mixed-race people.
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This episode is brought to you by our friends at the Jesuit Refugee Service. They work in 58 countries accompanying and serving forcibly displaced people, providing life changing emergency assistance, education, mental health support and more to millions each year. Get to know their work, visit jrsusa.org agustin.
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You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Catholic Saints podcast. I am Taylor Kemp, our vice president of content here at the Augusta Institute, and with me today is Dr. Scott Heffelfinger, who is a faculty member here and also our director of content development. Scott, welcome.
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Thanks for having me.
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It's great to have you. So, Scott, before we jump into Martin de Porres, what do you teach?
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I usually teach moral theology and the theology of the interior life. And so one of the main courses I teach, which I love doing, is a course called Moral and Spiritual theology. And we cover kind of the whole of the Christian life. And then the way this is embedded in prayer and kind of bears fruit in prayer. And prayer fructifies the moral life. So fructifies. Fructifies.
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Very nice. I have taken Dr. Heffelfinger's class. I was a student here and it is a great class. It was one of my favorites. I would say that whether you were here or not. But it is a great class. So if there are any listeners out there, because we are excited that the podcast is growing, that's great. We love the saints. But if there are any listeners out there, you love theology, you're interested in higher education, just go look at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. It is wonderful. I cannot speak highly enough about it. Okay.
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Nor can I.
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Nor. Yeah, Scott's biased. I paid to come here. You know, you were paid to be there. Different. Different arrangement. All right, everybody, so today we are talking about St. Martin de Porres. So, Scott, where should we begin? Well, before we even get to his life, when is his feast day?
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So November 3rd is the feast day of Saint Martin de Porres.
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Okay, great. Okay, so then Saint Martin de Porres, where to begin? Who is the man?
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Yeah, so we know him as a Dominican saint. That is actually kind of an interesting bit. Like what kind of Dominican are there kinds of Dominicans? And we'll get to that. But we're talking 16th century. He's born in 1579 in Lima, Peru. And you know, right there it's really fascinating to me because people will talk about the oldest saint in the Americas. Is Saint Rose of Lima, who, interestingly, was practically like a neighbor and a friend, actually of St. Martin. But here's the thing. Rose of Lima was canonized much earlier than St. Martin de Porres is.
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Women are holier.
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That could be. That could be. But although she's canonized earlier, St. Martin de Porres is born before her. So if you look at birth year, he is actually the oldest saint in the Americas.
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That's awesome.
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So, yeah, 1579, he's born. He's baptized in. I think it's St. Sebastian Church in Lima in the same baptismal font that Saint Rose of Lima will later be baptized. So they become friends later in life. So there's this kind of really neat, close connection. They're both Dominicans.
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They kind of fit into the. You'll often find the male female saints in pairs like Francis and Claire. So that's cool. I had no idea. I mean, I knew of Rose of Lima, obviously, but I didn't know they were at the same time.
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Yeah, yeah. So they are contemporaries, and they are Dominicans. So the upbringing and kind of early situation of St. Martin is interesting, and it's complicated. He is the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman, and his mother was a freed slave of native and African descent.
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Wow.
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So he gets his darker complexion and his facial features and structure that we see in certain artistic depictions, mostly from his mother. And so, as the story goes, when his father saw his kind of darker appearance and these features, he refused to acknowledge him as his son.
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Wow.
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Two years later, a daughter is born. And at that point, the father abandons the family, and they are left in great poverty. That's not the end of the father son story. It gets really interesting. But they're in the situation of poverty, and so St. Martin goes to school, and he has already, early on, this tremendous holiness. He would spend hours at night in prayer as a young child. He would be sent to go get the groceries, and he would end up giving the money away to people who were in need. More need, I guess, than he was while they're on the way.
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Okay. So. Wow. So they were kind of thrust into poverty for him at a very young age. And then he was showing these signs of an early witness to holiness.
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Yeah, exactly. And just to come back to the father son side of the story, because it's easy to kind of get enraged about some of the racial things going on, the abandonment, all of that. But actually, shortly after he leaves a few years, I don't think we know the exact timing of this, he comes back and he actually is kind of reconciled with his children. He brings them with him so that they can be educated. And he even takes time out of his day to provide that education himself. And when he has them with him, he's walking down the street one time and a relative approaches, sees the darker features of the children and says to him, his name is John de Porres. John, whose children are these? He says, these are my children and I have them with me so that I can educate them. So he claims them, and he eventually then goes on to become governor of Panama, maybe. So he entrusts them to the care of relatives. John goes back. Sorry, not John. Martin goes back to his mother. And the father then provides money so they don't have to live in poverty. He can finish his education. And he specifically instructs that John is to be confirmed in the faith. So there's kind of this conversion of sorts with the father.
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There is. Do we know anything about why.
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Why he has this change of heart?
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Change of heart? Yeah, I.
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No, I don't think we do, because.
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It'S a great story. I mean, it's very redemptive and, you know, who knows? But for John, this would have to be a true.
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Because I'm sure that St. Martin was praying for his father, but, yeah, it's really quite beautiful. And I love how our God is a God of second chances.
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Yeah, that's right.
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And you can't sort of write someone off or write something off right at the get go because you never know how it's going to turn out. So it's a beautiful kind of coming about.
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Okay. So for Martin, he has this upbringing, school, he has this kind of reconciliation with his father. Where do we go from there?
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Yeah. So then part of his childhood also was that in order to make money for the family when they were in poverty, he became a barber, which is what we would think, except that it also had this dimension of being kind of like a not fully professional doctor. Barbers would do a lot of like, bloodletting, which was a medical technique, then treating broken injuries. Yeah. Somehow these got combined and so he learned.
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He wouldn't have thought, wouldn't have thought of hair cutting and.
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Let's go to the barber.
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Yeah.
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Medical. Or is it gonna be a haircut or are they gonna do some blood work? Yeah.
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Are they gonna take my blood? Okay. Fascinating.
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Yeah. So. And this, this is important in his story because he enters the Dominicans and in a way, a central part of his sort of mission within the order is healing. I mean, there are all kinds of episodes where he is involved. He's put in charge of the infirmary, and there are miraculous healings and all of this. But when he enters the Dominicans, he enters as what we would nowadays probably call an oblate or a kind of third order layperson. And the reason for this, it goes back to some of these racial tensions. I mean, the history of Peru generally and of Lima in particular. There's just a lot with colonization, and I think we have to kind of acknowledge that and own that in a certain way. It's very violent at first, but it becomes a kind of cultural center. But some of these racial attitudes are institutionalized in laws. And one of those laws is that those of African or native descent are not allowed to enter the Dominican order sort of fully. And so because he wants to enter the order, Saint Martin becomes an oblate. So obviously there's some sort of injustice here, and we can kind of get fired up about that nowadays. But it's interesting that later Martin is given a chance because of his holiness, because of his penance, because of his reputation, he's given a chance to kind of step in, into a higher role. And although he will profess the vows, he chooses to remain an oblate, which is a very unusual situation. Yeah. So he, in his humility, kind of refuses being lifted higher. What was initially, you could sort of say an injustice according to the law becomes. How do we want to put it? Like a cross that he takes over.
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An opportunity of humility. I mean, it's very. There were two things that kind of come to mind. The first is from the gospels, when Christ is talking to the gentile woman and she's asking for his aid. And he has that. What can appear to be this very harsh line of, you know, the dogs don't feed at the children's table. And she says, but, Lord, let even the dogs receive the crumbs.
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And she kind of runs with it.
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She kind of runs with it. And you've always. You kind of dig under that of like, lord, what's going on in that? And recognizing, you know, Jesus is providing kind of an opportunity for humility, for her to embrace humility, which she does. She says, yeah, okay, I'm. We all are beggars before God. And. And the Lord responds positively to her. So you can see how that is. And then it's. It's very Teresian in a way. All is grace. Recognizing that for us in our lives, these moments where we're tried, these moments where we're, you know, unjustly Put in a certain circumstance recognizing like, okay, maybe this is an injustice or an ill that is being done to me, but within God's providence, like, no, this is actually still for my good. And that.
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Right.
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He's really embodying that there.
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And I think that balance you just identified is so important. Right. You can still acknowledge that there's some injustice there, but, you know, you could either sort of stay frustrated about that and, you know, all upset, or you can run with it, you know, and accept it, at least for the time being. Right. And in the position. Depends on the position you're in and all that. But as you know, this is a cross that God has given me. What does he want to bring out of this?
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Yeah, he's working a good in me in that. Yeah, that's a, that's a beautiful example.
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He works a great good in the life of Saint Martin de Porres out of that and the humility that he has. And so he, you know, for a lot of these reasons, he's the patron saint, among other things, of racial harmony and interracial justice. And the way he does this, though, doesn't really fit exactly our contemporary mold. He is that. But he'll say things later on when the convent is in debt. He'll say basically, you know, sell me. Because he's a, a mulatto of mixed descent. He says, sell me, I'm the property of the order. You're kind of like, whoa, you know, or he would call himself sometimes a poor slave. And, you know, there can be a kind of gospel way of understanding that. But, you know, it's just not quite the. There's a point here about like indignation that I want to come back to later where we're very quick to get like all angry and to have this kind of self justified indignation. And he shows us another way when it comes to racial harmony. But also, you know, generally a lot of other things.
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Yeah. And one of the great. I think what you're calling out is very important as it relates to racial justice. Acknowledging true injustice of any kind, whether it's race or otherwise, but recognizing, you know, as Christians, and this is in the Psalms, that justice is the Lord. So we can, we can strive to improve things in rightly ordered ways. Nonviolent, typically. Right. We can seek to continue to build up a greater society, work toward the common good, while interiorly still accepting the Lord is working for my good within the injustices of the day. But recognizing justice is the Lord's that we can never overstep. And try to overthrow, like you have to use these things delicately. But recognizing like true justice is up to God. And our task before us is to seek our role within the circles of influence that we have and within what is properly ordered.
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Right. And of course, you know, if we were talking about, let's say, a saint who maybe occupied a relatively high social position or a political position, maybe their way of rectifying this would be different. But that was not St. Martin's position. And so his sort of interpretation of God's providence was in this humbler way. And so, you know, just to kind of bring the story to a close, he. He lives as a. As a Dominican oblate from that skill in some kind of medicine that he had developed as a child and miraculous sort of gifts attached to that, miraculous healings and things. He's put in charge of the infirmary. And his life kind of revolves around caring for the sick, serving those in need, obvious prayer life. He has a remarkable contemplative life with many mystical gifts. But there's one really beautif scene within this kind of stage of his life that I wanted to highlight, and that is there's an epidemic at a certain point in Lima. And so they've separated the sick in the convent and locked them away kind of in one wing. And Martin, who has a servant's heart, wants to care for the poor and the sick. He visits them anyway by passing through the locked door. So this is one of his amazing gifts of sort of by location. And he ends up bringing so many sick to be cared for into the convent that his superior basically forbids it. And so he's not allowed to bring people in. But then he's out on the street, he finds someone who's terribly injured, and his sister has opened up a kind of hospice to care for people. But he can't get the man there in time, so he brings him into his own room in the convent. The superior finds out about this, gets angry at him, and St. Martin has the best response. He says, forgive my error and please instruct me, for I did not know that the precept of obedience took precedence over that of charity. You know, what a like, gentle, loving zinger. And the superior is like, converted by this, changes his mind, gives him free reign to care for the sick as he feels led to. It's amazing.
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That is amazing.
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I did not know that the precept of obedience, you know, takes precedence trump charity, man.
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That is quite the line. The question I have is, what if the superior would have remained obstinate what.
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Would he have done?
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What would he have done?
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I know, but that is hard to know. I think that's.
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That is a great line. You gotta love the wisdom of the saints with like the one liners. You're like, they can cut to the.
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Heart so quickly, which is so gently and like, humbly.
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Yeah.
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So, you know, he lives out his life. He dies in 1639, so he's 60 years old. They say that about 25 years ago they exhumed his body. It was sort of incorruptible, had a sweet fragrance. And that began his cause for canonization. In addition to his reputation for great holiness, his mystical gifts, and all these wonderful parts of his story.
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So what do you think? Thank you for kind of walking us through his life. What stuck out to you for, you know, particular things that we remember about Saint Martin de Porres today for, you know, why is he a saint? Why does the church present him to us as a model of holiness and virtue?
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Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, in the depictions that we see of him, he's often accompanied by a dog or we see other animals.
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Because he has a dog.
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Yeah, it could be that.
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Contra cat people.
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Contra cat people. That's why we remember him today. Sign of contradiction. No, he. And this is because he was known to sort of communicate with the animals. There's a story of his coaxing or talking some mice into bowing at the mention of the Holy Trinity or something like that, you know, so he's sort of like this almost Franciscanish Dominican, but I think he's just such a humble model of holiness. He just shows us, I think, a way of living out the faith. Even though he's gifted from a very early age, living out the faith with great humility. And that, I think the fruit of those tremendous mystical gifts. Right. Supernatural gifts, the fruit is a service of charity. He lives his life so much at the service of others, and despite the hardship of his upbringing and maybe even because of it, he really has a heart of service, a heart inflamed by charity that's sort of further enkindled in his. In his life of prayer.
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Yep, yep. I couldn't agree more. You know, before we close, Scott, are there, you know, some practical kind of takeaways for listeners out there of how we could kind of drink from the teaching or model of witness from St. Martin that we could implement in our lives today?
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Yeah, I think a couple of lessons that I have learned from him that I think are really helpful. I kind of alluded to one earlier that the path of humility rather than kind of self justified indignation, that should be our first bet. There's a way we all tend to like, get upset about something and if we're, you know, a little bit well formed in our faith, we want to say something like, well, this is a, this is a righteous anger. You know, like there is an injustice. And that can be true in a way. But we have to realize there will always be a temptation to too much indignation, to too much self justification. I think St. Martin provides a balance for that. And then the other thing is to remember that these mystical gifts that he had, as I mentioned, they are really at the service of charitable works. And so when we look at our own prayer life, often we want to see signs of our progress, like, oh, I've been praying and praying and how far am I coming? Am I growing in holiness? And sometimes the Lord will give us some profound signs in our prayer, but really the surest sign is to look outside of our prayer and to see is that prayer bearing fruit in love of others. So our prayer is of course for God and for love of God, but in a way, one of the best measures is our love for neighbor and to look at our charitable work. So I think St. Martin really kind of impresses these lessons upon us today.
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Yep, I, those are excellent. So I couldn't agree more. He's a great saint. Scott, thank you for walking us through that today. And thank you listeners out there for tuning into Catholic Saints, where we hope to kind of highlight the great witnesses of faith that we have and bring glory to God through the transformative power of his grace. So thank you so much for joining us on Catholic Saints. We will see you next time. God bless.