Happy Feast Day of St. Martin de Porres!


Today is the feast of St. Martin de Porres, the first Black American Saint. He was the illegtimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a young Black free woman. His father was repelled by the darkness of his son's skin at birth and abandoned him, leaving the child-raising to his mother.

At age 12, Martin was apprenticed to a "surgeon," at that time a combination of barber, druggist, physician and surgeon. Once trained, he began to use his skills to serve the poor. At fifteen, he became a lay brother at the Dominican Friary in Lima, where he worked as a barber, a farm laborer, a clothier, and a care-giver for the sick. Each day Martin distributed food to the hungry, he was doctor to the sick, and he helped to establish an orphanage and a hospice for abandoned babies.

Martin devoted himself to severe penances. In turn, God endowed him with many graces and an abundance of spiritual gifts: visions, ecstasies, bilocation (being two places at the same time), healing, and supernatural understanding.

St. Martin's love was all-embracing, shown equally to humans and to animals, including vermin. Like St. Francis, Martin treated animals as brothers and sisters and they did whatever he told them to do. He maintained a hospital for cats and dogs at his sister's house. A close friend of St. Rose of Lima, Martin died in 1639 and was canonized in 1962.

Legend has it that if you pray to St. Martin and see a mouse on his feast day, you will receive an answer to a prayer, so I am sending a mouse your way today.

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