ST. MARTIN DE PORRES: FROM CONQUEST TO COMPASSION
The minority and immigrant populations in the United States are constantly in flux. We become especially mindful of the importance of these communities in an election year, as the major parties vie for votes in these sectors of the population. Our nation has always been a mosaic of colors and ethnicities, and at most points in our history we have celebrated that reality as part of the uniqueness of what it means to be American. But not always. Hatred and violence have written their verses in our history books too. Words like Ku Klux Klan, affirmative action, civil rights, illegal alien, border patrol and English-only have sometimes felt like earthquakes running beneath the political and cultural landscape of the country. Racism and anti-immigrant sentiments still run deep in the hearts of many today.
In 1579, in Lima, Peru, a mixed-blood child named Martin de Porres was born to a poor, freed African slave woman. His skin was black; his last name, at least once his father came around and allowed him to have a last name, was Spanish. Through much of his life he was called a “mulatto dog,” yet he himself grew to be a saintly man freed from the shackles of hatred. His heart was universal, embracing with healing love a broken world. Martin de Porres is a saint who has much to say to us today, as we continue to struggle with cultural, racial and religious diversity in the twenty-first century.
Martin de Porres’ childhood began in chaos. About forty years before his birth (1533), Peru’s Incan emperor, Atahualpa, was assassinated by Francisco Pizarro, facilitating the conquest of the entire Incan empire. Almost overnight, the conquistadores reduced to slavery a people who had been free for centuries. Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas, writing in his monumental History of the Indies just before the time of Martin’s birth, spoke of seeing the face of Christ in the indigenous peoples of the Americas who were “beaten, afflicted, insulted and crucified by those Spaniards who destroy and ravage the Indians” in their greedy pursuit of gold and power.
Martin de Porres was born into this very reality of a people “beaten and crucified,” a people who struggled daily with the dehumanizing reality of poverty and the violence of living under the domination of the Spanish Empire. What is amazing, though, as one looks back at Martin de Porres’ difficult beginnings, is that his life is a testimony to the transforming love of God. In others, these same harsh conditions would have resulted in a life of bitterness and anger. Martin, however, gave the chaos and poverty of his surroundings to God, who took the Spanish and African threads of his heart and wove them into a beautiful tapestry of divine love.
Martin’s baptismal record reads: “On Wednesday, the ninth of December 1579, I baptized Martin, son of an unknown father and of Ana Velázquez, a free Black woman.” With these few words we already have a glimpse into the unique life of Martin, who came into this world already touched by suffering. Martin was probably just a day or two old on the day of his baptism, as this was the custom of the time.
Ana, his mother, had come from Panama; given the laws of the day, we know that she would have been freed from slavery either by paying for her freedom or by having been granted it by her slave owner. History knows of her because of her presence that December day at the Church of San Sebastián in Lima where, with the support of Martin’s godparents, she had no choice but to face the hard reality of raising her firstborn son as a poor, single mother. As we look back several centuries later, we see her story reflected in the stories of many people of our own day. She had very little support, except for her faith in God.
The fact that Martin’s mother had been a slave is quite a significant piece of the story, especially when one considers the whole scope of Martin’s life and commitment to the poor. Martin, the mulatto saint from Peru, had the blood of African slaves running through his veins. His heart carried within it the story of his ancestors. As Martin’s soul grew in saintliness, he never lost touch with his African roots.
Just as significant as his African heritage – at least in terms of molding Martin during his early years – was the Spanish side of his life. The baptismal annotation, “son of an unknown father,” put Martin into the category of an illegitimate child. In sixteenth century Catholicism, this was no easy label to live with. Says author Alex García-Rivera, in his book St. Martin de Porres: The ‘Little Stories’ and the Semiotics of Culture, “Juan [de Porres] condemned his son to illegitimacy, a serious consequence in the strictly hierarchical society of Lima.”
Martin’s father was a Spaniard, a descendant from a long line of hidalgos – elite Christian warriors who were fiercely loyal to the class of Spanish nobility; their greatest honor was to die in war. Juan de Porres’ fathering of a son – especially with a woman of African descent – would have been considered a cause of great shame, given the moral codes that regulated the life of an hidalgo. Rather than courageously admit that the dark-skinned son was his own, Juan chose instead to play it safe and distance himself from the family. Though he did reappear for a very short episode in 1586, taking Martin and his younger sister, Juana, to Ecuador, with the intention of providing the two with an education, he never really was a father to Martin. Juana stayed in Ecuador, but Martin returned to Lima a year later. It seems that Martin only saw his father once more after that – a rather embarrassing moment – when his father showed up at the Dominican priory shortly after Martin’s entry to complain that his son was being treated as a second class friar. To this day historians wonder if the father’s temper tantrum was not more a reaction to the public shaming of his own honor, rather than a true defense of his black-skinned son’s dignity.
The Peru of Martin’s lifetime was witness to the clash of three very different worlds: Spanish conquistadors on one hand, and conquered Indians and enslaved Africans on the other. Says the African-American historian Cyprian Davis, OSB, “In the sixteenth century a Spaniard would have believed that a war with the Moslems was always justified. Black Africans were seen as inhabitants of Moslem territory. Hence, they could be enslaved” (The History of Black Catholics in the United States). This was the world Martin was born into. One cannot help but wonder what it felt like for Martin, a dark-skinned mulatto, whose mother was a freed Black slave and whose father who was part of the same army of white conquerors that was profiting from the trafficking of African slaves?
It is important for us to feel the social hell that Martin lived in. We simply perpetuate the injustice of the European conquest of the Americas if all we do is look back and admire beautiful little Martin with his broom in hand, sweeping the corridors of the Dominican cloister with an angelic face. Martin was born into the violence of war and oppression, and even his life of prayer and saintly service in the Church was an uphill battle against the evils of institutionalized racism.
It seems a rather tragic picture – at least, that is, until one looks into the heart and soul of Martin himself, and glimpses with awe the life of this man of faith who, in a way similar to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, decided very early on to make of his life “something beautiful for God.” Known for many special gifts, it is perhaps as an instrument of God’s healing love that he is best known and revered. Martin’s tremendous gifts as a healer most certainly flowed from his own experience of inner healing. He who had been loved into wholeness by God, wanted nothing more than to pass that same healing love of God onto others.
Though he had a special concern for the poor, especially Blacks and Indians, Martin’s healing knew no borders. He made use of African, indigenous, and herbal medicine, while trusting above all in the healing love of Jesus Christ – the result being a mixture of shamanistic curandero and prophetic healer. Long before it was ever articulated, Martin knew that healing meant wholeness of body, mind and spirit. Rivera-García shares one of the many healing stories:
One day Martin went to visit Father Pedro Montes de Oca, who was in bed because of an illness of the leg. A silly remark made by Martin angered the priest, who then called Martin “a mulatto dog and other bad things.” Martin left the cell laughing, and the next day returned with a salad of capers. “Well, father, are you still mad? Eat this little salad of capers which I bring you.” The priest was amazed, “for he had wanted such a salad all day being so sick from this illness, suffering from hunger, and also the pain of knowing his leg was to be amputated the following day ... Thinking this an act of God, he asked pardon of Brother Martin for the anger and the words.” He then asked Martin to take pity on him. Martin laid his hands on the leg, and the friar was healed and freed from danger.
What makes the above story so powerful is that Martin loved and healed even those who treated him unjustly. His patience and humor with Father Pedro were about much more than just healing a bad leg. Martin wanted to heal the whole person, and in the process, bring healing and reconciliation to a world torn apart by violence and hatred. One cannot help but see in Martin de Porres’ nonviolent love the silhouette of another Martin – Martin Luther King, Jr. – whose life would also be offered, three centuries later, as a healing balm for a broken and violent world.
Martin de Porres’ gifts of healing began to be nurtured during his early years, probably learning his first traditional African remedies from his mother. In the Malambo neighborhood, where many of the recently-arrived African slaves were held in fenced-in camps guarded by dogs, Martin apprenticed under two healers. The first was Mateo Pastor, who taught Martin the art of preparing herbal medicines. He later spent several years as an apprentice to the barber and surgeon, Marcelo de Ribera, who became one of Martin’s lifetime friends.
A barber in Martin’s day did just about everything that a family doctor and dentist and pharmacist and nurse and physical therapist would do today – and a bit more. They cut hair, pulled teeth, treated burns, dressed and stitched wounds, let out blood, fixed fractures, did minor surgeries and prescribed medicines. For Martin, the healing ministry offered him a way of being the hands and heart of Christ in the world. It was never just a job or a career; it was his vocation. He knew well that he was an instrument of God’s healing, and would often say to those who were healed, “I cure you; may God heal you.”
For Martin, healing was more than just curing a physical ailment. It was about presence, about being with the sick, communicating God’s healing love to them. José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu, a Peruvian historian who has collected many stories of the saint in his book San Martín de Porras, recounts the testimony of one of Martin’s Dominican brothers: “He served [the sick] on his knees, taking care of them throughout the night, one or two weeks at a time, according to each one’s needs. He lifted them up, helped them lie down, washed them – even those with the most awful infirmities – his heart aflame like that of an angel.”
In more recent times, we see this very same healing presence expressed in the words of Pierre Claverie, a Dominican friar and bishop who served for many years in the Diocese of Oran, Algeria – a region racked by religious fundamentalism and war. Preaching to Dominican nuns in France in June 1996, Bishop Claverie spoke of his own desire to be faithful to his Christian vocation in a country so sickened by violence, and what it means to be present, to “stand watch” alongside the poor and the vulnerable:
People have often asked me: “What do you do there? Why do you stay ? ... Go back home!” Home ... Where is our home? ... We are there [in Algeria] because of this crucified Messiah. Because of nothing else and no one else! ... We are there like someone at the bedside of a friend, or of a sick brother, in silence, holding his hand, and wiping his brow. Because of Jesus, because it is he who suffers there, in this violence that spares no one, crucified anew in the flesh of thousands of innocent people.”
“We are there because of Jesus.” This is what it means to be present to those who suffer. This is the healing love that Martin so beautifully expressed with his life. Five weeks after preaching this homily, on August 1, 1996, Bishop Claverie was assassinated in front of his home in Oran. Like Martin, he was faithful in keeping vigil through the long, dark night – there – alongside his beloved people.
Martin, too, was faithful – always there – for the poor and the sick. In another of Busto’s accounts, one day they brought to Martin an African slave who had been wounded in a fight, his entrails hanging out. Martin immediately ran up to his cell and brought down some wine and rosemary. “He knelt down next to the Black man and began to suck the blood from the gaping wound. He then washed it with the wine and dressed the wound with rosemary which he chewed into a paste.” Four days later the man was well. We certainly are not accustomed to such vivid images – someone sucking blood from a wound – but we must not fail to see the symbolism that lies hidden in Martin’s gesture of love: Kneeling at the side of a body covered with blood, kissing the wounds, healing them with wine. These are images that call to mind both the passion of Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist. Martin’s whole life was lived as an expression of his profound experience of Christ. As Bishop Claverie said, echoing the words of Bartolomé de las Casas five centuries earlier, “It is Jesus who suffers there ... crucified anew in the flesh of thousands of innocent people.”
St. Martin de Porres has left us a great legacy of love. His life, like the life of many other saints, was lived by faithfully and obediently following in the footsteps of Christ, who freely gave his life to the world out of love. Again, we see in the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a prophet and martyr of our own times – a similar path, a life given to others in love:
“To our bitterest opponents we say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, we shall continue to love you ... Throw us in jail, we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half-dead and we shall still love you. One day we will win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process” (from Strength to Love).
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Brian J. Pierce, OP is a member of the Dominican Province of St. Martin de Porres, in the southern USA. After many years of missionary work in Latin America, Brian now accompanies and ministers to our Order’s contemplative Dominican nuns worldwide. Portions of this article are reprinted with permission from his book, Martin de Porres: Saint of the Americas (St. Louis, MO: Liguori Press, 2004 – now distributed by New City Press).
