Novena to St. Martin de Porres

Martin was born in Lima, Peru, in 1579, the son of a Spanish nobleman and Ana Velázquez, a freed woman of African and possibly indigenous descent; his father initially refused to acknowledge him, and Martin grew up in poverty in a colonial society sharply and legally stratified by ancestry. Apprenticed in his youth to a barber-surgeon, he learned the medical and pharmaceutical skills of the trade before seeking entry to Lima's Dominican priory, where the religious constitutions of the time barred candidates of his ancestry from full membership; he was received instead as a lay helper and, later, admitted as a lay brother once his superiors recognized his holiness. He spent the rest of his life caring for the sick, the poor, and enslaved people of every background in Lima without distinction, ran an orphanage and a shelter for abandoned children, and became known for a charity that crossed the very social and racial lines that had once excluded him. He died in 1639 and was canonized in 1962 by Pope John XXIII, the first person of African descent from the Americas to be so honored, and is invoked today above all as a patron of racial harmony and of those who care for the sick and the poor.

Biographical facts drawn from standard, widely corroborated Dominican hagiography and historical scholarship on colonial Lima, and from the documented record of his 1962 canonization by Pope John XXIII.