Mulatto Saint

"We most strictly command that nowhere in the provinces of the Indies may there ever be received to the holy habit or profession of our order those who are begotten on the side of either one of their parents of Indian or African blood," read the statute of the Dominican order in 17th century Peru. Thus, the lowly Martin de Porres, offspring of a dalliance between a Peruvian grandee and a freed Negro slave girl, could never aspire to full priestly status in the Dominican Convent of the Most Holy Rosary in Lima. He took this mortification humbly, and gave a selfless life of service to the friary and the city as a tertiary of the order. This week Pope John XXIII amended the slight and more: at a 3 1/2-hour cere mony in St. Peter's Basilica he made Martin de Porres the church's first mulatto saint.*

To Sell Himself. Brother Martin ranks among the church's spectacular healers of the sick and comforters of the afflicted. As the convent's almoner, he gave away more than $2,000 a week in food and clothing to Lima's poor. Placed in charge of the Dominican infirmary, he filled up the beds with ailing human derelicts whom he found lying in the streets. Be fore he died in 1639, Brother Martin had established an orphanage and foundling hospital. He loved animals as well as people, and filled the convent with wounded stray dogs and cats, which he nursed back to health. He even liked the convent mice, feeding them scraps of food and setting up a shelter for them in the garden.

Martin de Porres' private life was austere. He never ate meat, fasted completely from Holy Thursday until noon on Easter. In imitation of St. Dominic, he lashed himself three times nightly with a whip whose hooked ends were weighted with iron. Once, when the convent fell into debt, he suggested that his superior could raise some of the money by selling him as a slave; the offer was prudently refused.

"The Same Dignity." Famed in his own lifetime for his miraculous cures of the dying, Brother Martin was venerated by Limenos as a potential saint almost from the day of his death. He was beatified by Pope Gregory XVI in 1837, and Pope Pius XI reopened the investigation of his life in 1926, after devotion to him had spread outside Peru to the U.S. and Africa.

Clearly, it was Brother Martin's heroic life, rather than the color of his skin, that brought him official church recognition as a saint. But just as clearly, his canonization was intended to honor Roman Catholics in Africa and Asia, and to point up Rome's stiffening opposition to racial prejudice. Notes the official Vatican account of his sanctity: "By his whole apostolic life, his prayers, his words, his example, even his miracles, he made it clear that every race and nationality has the same dignity, the same equality, because we are all sons of one heavenly Father and redeemed by Christ the Lord."

*The church has already canonized on Negro, St. Benedict the Moor, a 16th century Franciscan whose parents were slaves from Africa; he was declared a saint in 1807.

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