"Compassion, my dear Brother, is preferable to cleanliness."
Some people spend their lives cleaning up after others. They sweep the floor that someone else will walk across and wash the sheets that someone else will sleep in. Nobody thanks them, and some people look right through them. Martin de Porres was one of them for most of his life. He was a servant in a convent, a barber with a razor and a basin, a man everyone could see and nobody quite wanted to look at.
He was also the child of a Spanish nobleman who would not claim him, and of a freed woman of African descent whom the law had taught him to be ashamed of. In the Lima of his day, that made him a man of mixed race, born outside marriage, and by the rules of his own religious order, not even eligible to wear the habit.
He wore it anyway, in the end. He became the person the sickest and poorest people in Lima asked for by name, and the one the viceroy knelt beside when he was dying.
This is the saint for anyone who has been made to feel like less because of where they came from. It is for the person who does the unseen work, who has been looked down on by people who should know better, and who is tempted to either give up or hit back. Martin did neither. He picked up the broom and kept going. What he did with it is one of the strangest and most beautiful stories in the Church.
The City of Kings and the Child Nobody Claimed
Lima in 1579 was a young city and a rich one. The Spanish had founded it less than fifty years earlier, and it had grown quickly into the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, the center of Spanish power in South America. The silver of the mountains moved through it. So did enslaved men and women from Africa, who were brought into the port by the shipload and sold, and who did most of the physical work of the city. The population was sorted by blood, from Spaniards at the top to Africans and Indians at the bottom, with people of mixed descent somewhere uneasy in between.
Martin was born into the middle of that, on December 9, 1579. His father was Don Juan de Porres, a Spanish gentleman from Burgos. His mother was Ana VelΓ‘zquez, a freed woman from Panama. They were not married, and Don Juan was not eager to acknowledge what he had done. Martin was baptized in the Church of Saint Sebastian, and two years later his sister Juana was born.
For a while the family lived on whatever Ana could earn, which was mostly laundry work. Then Don Juan did something that was either conscience or convenience. When Martin was about eight, he took the children with him to Guayaquil, in what is now Ecuador, and saw to their upbringing. Later he was appointed governor of Panama and returned Martin to Lima, leaving Ana with enough money to support the children. After that, he disappears from the story. The boy grew up knowing he had a father somewhere who had not chosen to stay.
The Boy Who Was Handed a Razor
There was no easy path for a boy like Martin. He was too poor for the schools and too mixed for the guilds. The law of the time barred people of African and Indian descent from most respectable positions, and the contempt was not only in the law. He was called names in the street. People mocked his skin and his mother, and his illegitimacy was a standing joke.
His mother found him a trade. Around the age of twelve, he was apprenticed to a barber-surgeon, a man named Marcelo de Rivero according to the tradition. In those days that was not only a matter of haircuts. A barber-surgeon cut hair, pulled teeth, bled patients, set bones, and mixed herbal medicines. Martin learned all of it, and he turned out to be good at it, with steady hands and a natural gift for knowing what a sick person needed.
He was also praying. The accounts from people who knew him as a boy agree that he kept long hours of prayer, that he slipped away to the church whenever he could, and that his gentleness was already notable. He was not a bitter young man. That is worth noticing. Plenty of people who have grown up as he did would have every right to be.
Something else was growing in him. He was learning to heal bodies, and he wanted to do something for souls too.
The Door That Was Locked by Law
At fifteen, in 1594, Martin went to the Dominican convent of the Holy Rosary in Lima and asked to be taken in.
He knew what he was up against. The constitutions of the order at that time said no one of African descent could be received to the habit or to profession. He did not ask to be a priest, or even a full brother. He asked to be a donado, a kind of volunteer who gave his labor in exchange for a place to live. He asked to be a servant.
They took him. He started at the bottom, with the broom. He swept the corridors and the dormitories, cleaned the rooms, did the laundry, worked in the kitchen, and when it was needed, he used the razor he had learned to use. He cut the friars' hair and bled the sick. And he kept sweeping. In time the brothers had a name for him. They called him the Saint of the Broom, and at first it was half a joke.
The convent was a large house of some three hundred men, and not all of them welcomed him. A novice called him a "mulatto dog." A priest mocked him for his birth and his family. Martin took it and said nothing. When the abuse came, he went to the chapel.
Meanwhile he was becoming something else. The prior, Juan de Lorenzana, had been watching.
Nine Years on the Floor
It would be easy to tell this part of the story as if it were simple. It was not simple. Martin waited about nine years in that convent before anyone gave him a vow to take. For nine years he was a servant in a house where he could see the very men who had the power to admit him, and where some of them were looking at him with contempt.
What he did in those years was pray and work. His days started early and ended late. He slept very little. He fasted often and ate sparingly, and in the tradition of the order he took the discipline, scourging himself to share in the sufferings of Christ. At night he stayed in the chapel before the crucifix, which he loved. People who watched him say he was often found there when the others were asleep.
He also did something harder, which was to keep his temper. Martin was a man, and he felt every insult. He did not pretend the slurs did not hurt. But he understood something about Christ, who had also been mocked and had said nothing. He took the ridicule the way he took the rest of it, as something to offer up. He told himself that the Lord had suffered worse.
In the end, Lorenzana made the decision. He decided that the law did not apply in this case. Martin had earned his place, and no one could say otherwise. On June 2, 1603, at the age of twenty-three, Martin made his religious profession as a Dominican lay brother. He was given the habit he had been serving beside for nine years.
The Man Everybody Sent For
Once Martin was a brother, the work did not change much. He still swept, washed, cooked, and cut hair. But he was given the infirmary, and that was where he became famous.
He nursed the sick friars with a tenderness that surprised even those who knew him well. He was a trained surgeon and a skilled herbalist, but the stories told about him go beyond skill. Friars gave accounts of fevers breaking when he put his hand on them. When an epidemic struck Lima, some sixty friars in the convent fell ill at once, many of them novices in a distant and isolated part of the building. Martin cared for them all.
His care did not stop at the convent wall. The poor of Lima came to the door, and he fed them. He begged from the rich, and gave to the poor what he collected, and it was said that the amounts were large. He took in the sick from the street. He ministered to enslaved Africans who had just been landed from the ships, many of them half dead, and treated them as people. He founded an orphanage and a school for children who had nowhere else to go.
He did not discriminate. Spaniards, Africans, and Indians were all sent to him, and he nursed them in the same way. It was said that he was a doctor to the poor and a friend to the rich, and that both groups trusted him more than they trusted anyone else.
He had friends among the saints. Rose of Lima, the tertiary who was herself on her way to canonization, respected him and worked with him. Another Dominican lay brother, John MacΓas, was a friend too. The three of them were doing the same work in the same city at the same time, and Lima was a holier place for it.
The wonders came as well. His brethren and the people of Lima reported that Martin could read hearts, that he appeared in places where he was not physically present, and that he was sometimes seen lifted off the ground in prayer. He was said to have cured an archbishop who then invited him to go to Mexico. Martin declined. His place was in Lima, with the poor.
The Mice, the Dogs, and the Man in His Bed
Two stories tell us the most about Martin.
The first concerns the sick man in his bed. One day Martin found a poor man, an Indian who had been attacked and left half dead on the road. He picked the man up and carried him to the convent and put him in his own cell, in his own bed. He tended the wounds himself. When the prior heard what had happened, he was angry. The rule forbade bringing outsiders into the cells. Martin had broken it.
Martin did not argue. He asked forgiveness. He said he had not known that the precept of obedience took precedence over that of charity. The prior, who was a wise man, understood that he had been given a lesson, and he gave Martin permission to care for the poor and the sick in whatever way he judged best. Another brother once reproved Martin for the state of his habit after he had tended a patient who was covered in sores and filth. Martin's reply became famous: compassion is better than cleanliness.
The second concerns the animals. Martin loved them, and they seem to have loved him. He set up a shelter for stray dogs and cats and nursed them when they were sick. The traditional images show him with a dog, a cat, and a mouse eating from the same dish. The best-known story is about the mice. The convent was overrun with them. The friars wanted them destroyed. Martin, the tradition says, spoke to them and promised to feed them if they would leave the building, and they did. The tale is told with a smile, but it points to something real. He did not believe that anything God had made was beneath his care.
What They Said About Him
Holiness does not make a man immune to criticism, and Martin was not immune.
He was never fully free of the contempt he started out with. Even after he became famous, some people in the convent could not forget what he was. He knew it. He did not defend himself. When he was praised, he deflected the praise. When the prior corrected him, he accepted the correction. He spoke of himself in the humblest terms, and those who knew him understood it as humility and not as self-hatred.
The convent also had money problems from time to time. According to the tradition, when the priory was in debt and the creditors were pressing, Martin offered himself to be sold as a slave to pay what was owed. He said that he was the property of the order and that they might as well sell him. The prior refused, but the offer says something about the man who made it. He had been treated as property by a society that had decided his body had a price, and he was prepared to use that as a gift.
Most of the time his opposition was quiet. It came in the form of slights, jokes, and small refusals. It is harder in some ways than open persecution, because there is nobody to fight. Martin answered it the same way every time, with work, prayer, and patience. It cost him something, and the cost was real. He did not become a saint by being immune to it. He became a saint by choosing, over and over, not to be defined by it.
The Death of the Brother Nobody Wanted
In January of 1639, when Martin was almost sixty, he fell ill with a fever. He knew what it meant. He was said to have told his brethren that his time had come, and he asked them to pray for him. The illness wore on through most of the year, and he grew steadily weaker.
The word went out through Lima, and the people who came to see him were not only the poor. The viceroy himself came to the convent and knelt by Martin's bed and asked for his blessing. Churchmen came. So did nobles. The man who had been a servant for nine years was dying in a room full of people who wanted something from him, and what they wanted was a blessing.
The friars gathered at his bed. Many of them had known him for decades. Martin asked them to say the Creed, and he held his crucifix in his hands. According to the tradition, he died as they recited the words, on November 3, 1639, in the Convent of the Holy Rosary where he had spent his life. He was fifty-nine years old.
The funeral drew great crowds. The people of Lima, who had spent his whole life being told that a man like him did not matter, came to say goodbye. Many of them already called him a saint, and they did not wait for Rome to tell them.
The Saint of Interracial Justice
The Church moved slowly, as it usually does. Pope Clement XIII declared Martin's heroic virtue in 1763. Pope Gregory XVI beatified him on October 29, 1837. In 1945, Pope Pius XII declared him patron of social justice works in Peru. On May 6, 1962, Pope John XXIII canonized him in Saint Peter's Basilica, more than three centuries after his death. In 1966, Pope Paul VI named him patron of barbers.
The patronages come straight out of his life.
Social justice and interracial harmony. Martin spent his life being treated as less than he was, and responded by treating every person he met as fully human. He fed the poor and nursed slaves and orphans, and he did not distinguish between races when he did it. The Church recognizes him as a patron of those who work for justice between peoples.
Mixed-race people. He was one, and he knew what it cost. Those who carry the same inheritance, the same ambiguity, and the same exposure to contempt have a brother in heaven who understands.
Barbers and hairdressers. He was a barber-surgeon before he was a religious, and he used his razor in the service of the sick for the rest of his life.
Innkeepers. The title is a traditional one, and it fits a man whose doors, whose bed, and whose table were open to anyone who needed shelter and food.
Public health workers. He was the infirmarian of a large convent, he nursed the sick through epidemics, and he treated people others would not touch. Those who work today in hospitals and clinics, and who go into the places where illness is, have a model in him.
His remains rest in the Basilica and Convent of Santo Domingo in Lima, the same house where he swept the floors. Pilgrims still come to pray there.
A Prayer to Saint Martin de Porres
O God, you led your servant Martin from the broom and the basin to the glory of your kingdom. Teach us to see your Son in the poor, the sick, and the despised, and give us the courage to serve them without counting the cost. Free us from pride, and from the fear of what others think. Through the prayers of Saint Martin, make us gentle in word and steady in work, until we come to the joy you have prepared for us. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Martin de Porres, pray for us.
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