In Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Martín de Porres (2014), Celia Cussen, Professor of History at the Universidad de Chile, examines the life and legacy of  St. Martín de Porres, a 17th century Afro-Peruvian healer-saint. St. Martín was the son of a Spanish nobleman and an enslaved woman of African descent. He became a lay member of a Dominican community, as it was illegal under racist “purity of blood” laws in Spanish colonies for people of African or indigenous descent to profess vows as full members of religious orders. Cussen describes how St. Martín distinguished himself as a healer among all sectors of Lima’s society: indigenous people, free and enslaved people of African descent, and Spaniards of all social standings came to him for help (56). 

Martín trained as a barber-surgeon, a kind of medical specialization that did not require university education (it was also illegal for people of African descent to attend university). The work of barber-surgeons involved direct, physical contact with those seeking treatment, the kind of work that trained doctors viewed as “unseemly” (78). The intimacy portrayed in the stories of Martín’s healings was a result of his exclusion from official training, but it also mirrors the closeness of the encounters between Jesus and those who sought healing. This can be seen in today’s gospel, in which Jesus heals a “great throng” of sick people who have come to him at a deserted place where he had fled to pray. Jesus’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes in this gospel is an expression of the compassion that he felt for those who came to him for healing.

Martín drew upon the diversity of healing arts in Spanish colonial America, including indigenous, African, and European folk practices (73-78), but, according to the early stories about his life, he stood out from other healers precisely in the power of his touch: His “immense kindness spilled over” into the power to heal with “the touch of his hands” (111). Cussen explains that Martín’s acts of healing, in the context of the culture of his time, “extended beyond the physical to alleviate psychological and social suffering, always with the overarching aim of bringing all men and women into the realm of God and the Christian community” (57). Martín engaged not only in many acts of physical healing, but also in forms of “social healing,” reconciling conflicts and laboring to provide for those in material need without causing embarrassment (57-58). His miraculous acts included human, animal, and even plant beneficiaries (116-121). These acts were understood not merely as physical transformations but also as signs that God protected and cared for the residents of Lima in the midst of a violent and unpredictable environment (121). 

Cussen notes that early testimonies of St. Martín’s life portray his miraculous acts as deriving from his “spiritual proximity to the crucified Christ” (169). This closeness was described in ways characteristic of saintly biographies at the time, including a story in which St. Martín was found levitating up before the altar to embrace the body of Christ on the crucifix (169-170). If we read the stories of Jesus’s compassionate healing and feeding of those who came to him in the deserted place alongside the witness of St. Martín, our attention is drawn to the theological significance of healing: that in Christ, God intimately – physically and spiritually – embraces us, and responds to our deepest longings and needs.

The stories of Jesus’s healings have often been used in profoundly hurtful ways toward people with disabilities, communicating a message that disabled bodies are in need of “cures,” rather than addressing the ways in which our communities disadvantage people with disabilities. Readers of these stories should seek different frameworks for understanding Jesus’s healings which do not overemphasize bodily “cures.” The healings of St. Martín de Porres can help us understand healing in a broader sense. St. Martín, as Jesus does in the gospels, responded, compassionately and intimately, to the individuals and communities that sought him out.

In addition to Celia Cussen’s book on St. Martín de Porres, you can read more of her writings on South American religious history at her Academia.edu page.

Images of St. Martín de Porres typically depict him with rosary beads, reflecting the Dominican order’s long association with the rosary. St. Martín probably would have practiced this ancient form of Christian meditation frequently, reflecting on the mysteries of Christ’s life, suffering, death, and resurrection. It is likely that, at times, the images of the people he encountered in his work of healing in the city of Lima would have come to mind as he imagined Jesus’s and Mary’s joys, hopes, griefs, and anxieties. In other parts of today’s reflection, we have invited you to view Jesus’s healings through the lens of embrace and communal transformation, as seen in the life of St. Martín and as described by disability theologians. For the contemplative exercise, we invite you to meditate on the mysteries of the life of Christ through joining St. Martín in praying the rosary. Instructions on how the rosary is traditionally prayed can be found here. (If you don’t have rosary beads, you can say the prayers without them). But whether or not you pray the rosary as traditionally done, take some time to reflect on the mysteries of the rosary (episodes from the lives of Jesus and Mary) and notice if specific memories surface of individuals you have encountered in your own life. Allow yourself to see their faces, to hold them close in an embrace of care and compassion, as both Jesus and St. Martín did for those who came to them for healing.

As described in Celia Cussen’s book on St. Martín de Porres, Black Catholics in the United States in the 20th century promoted devotion to St. Martín for explicitly anti-racist motives, seeing St. Martín as a symbol of Black Catholic holiness and a sign of the irreconcilability of the Catholic faith with racial segregation and oppression. One example of this was the adoption of St. Martín (at the time, Blessed Martín) as a patron of Blessed Martin House, a Catholic Worker community in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin House provided child care to children of all races in the 1950s, during segregation and Jim Crow. The house was founded by Helen Caldwell Day (later Helen Caldwell Riley), a Black Catholic single mother who had become involved in the Catholic Worker movement while working as a nurse in New York City. In her memoir, Not Without Tears (1954), she related how she became a Third Order Dominican out of a desire to follow St. Martín into the Order. “He must have known too, and felt, I thought, the terrible loneliness of being different” as a Black Catholic (142-143). His example inspired her as she challenged the complacent violence of segregation in her Church and her country. To learn more about the life of Helen Caldwell Riley, see this article on her life by Amanda Daloisio.

Beloved Everybody Church is an “ability-inclusive” Christian community in Los Angeles affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). The church is “a community of people with and without intellectual, developmental, and other kinds of disabilities who strive to embody together a truly inclusive church community for people of all abilities” (“About Us”). The founding pastor of the community is Bethany McKinney Fox, the disability theologian cited earlier in this entry. On Fox’s blog, she reflects on how Christian communities can embody a vision of healing that goes beyond “bodies and curing,” and instead represents “all kinds of positive transformation a person or community may experience – emotionally, spiritually, socially, physically, and in all kinds of ways” (“Creating Communities of Wholeness & Healing in the Way of Jesus”). In the above reflections, we have presented St. Martín de Porres’s acts of care and compassion for all those he encountered as an example of this conception of healing. At Beloved Everybody Church, the community puts this framework into practice today.

The Black Catholic jazz musician Mary Lou Williams had a devotion to St. Martín de Porres. In Black Christ of the Andes (1963), considered a classic jazz album, she translated St. Martín’s presence into music. In the first track, “St. Martin de Porres,” she describes the life of St. Martín in terms that bring to mind the broad understanding of healing as intimate embrace and communal transformation described elsewhere in this entry:

St. Martin de Porres, his shepherd’s staff a dusty broom

St. Martin de Porres, the poor made a shrine of his tomb

St. Martin de Porres, he gentled creatures tame and wild

St. Martin de Porres, he sheltered each unsheltered child

This man of love, born of the flesh, yet of God

This humble man healed the sick, raised the dead, his hand is quick

To feed beggars and sinners, the starving homeless and the stray

Oh Black Christ of the Andes, come feed and cure us now we pray