Who was St. Martin de Porres?
He was born in Lima in 1579; Franciscan Media gives the day as December 9. His father was a Spanish nobleman, whom the Dominican nuns name as John de Porres, and his mother was Ana Velásquez, a freed woman from Panama, Black and possibly also of indigenous blood. His parents never married. The father acknowledged the boy only after eight years and later abandoned the family, and Martin grew up poor and dark-skinned in a city where, as Franciscan Media puts it, "half-breed" was the name the pure-blooded gave to such children.
At twelve he was apprenticed to a barber-surgeon and learned to cut hair, let blood, dress wounds and prepare medicines. Then he asked the Dominicans of the priory of the Holy Rosary to take him, not as a friar but as a servant. The Dominican nuns record that he was received as a servant and admitted to profession as a cooperator brother in 1603; Franciscan Media says the community asked him to profess after nine years, Vatican News after eight, when he was twenty-four. He worked in the kitchen, the laundry and the infirmary, and at thirty-four was put in charge of the infirmary, where he nursed sick friars, noblemen and slaves alike. He went out to the beggars of Lima, cared for enslaved Africans brought in through the port, raised money for dowries so poor girls could marry or enter a convent, and helped found an orphanage. The Dominican friars say he fed nearly two hundred people a day. When the priory fell into debt he told his superiors, "I am only a poor mulatto. Sell me. I am the property of the order. Sell me." He is remembered for another sentence too: "Compassion, my brother, is preferable to cleanliness."
Franciscan Media reports the spiritual gifts attributed to him, ecstasies, bilocation and cures, and his tenderness toward animals, and leaves them as reports. He died in Lima on November 3, 1639, at fifty-nine. Vatican News says his body was found incorrupt twenty-five years later. Three centuries after his death, on May 6, 1962, St. John XXIII canonized him and recalled in his homily that the people had called him Martín de la Caridad, Martin of Charity, and that Pius XII had named him patron of all the social institutions of Peru.
Why Catholics pray to St. Martin for the poor, for racial justice and for healing
The poor and the sick are the easy part. He was one of them, and he spent his life with them. The Dominican friars call him the Apostle of Charity. John XXIII said he willingly attended the sick, provided food, clothing and medicine to the weak, "favored with all his strength the peasants, the Black people and the mestizos," and in his humility judged everyone more just and better than himself. A barber-surgeon who became an infirmarian is a natural saint to ask for healing, and the cures reported in his lifetime made him so.
Racial justice is the patronage people search for most, and it is traditional, not declared. The Dominican friars call him "the patron saint of work for interracial justice and harmony"; Franciscan Media lists race relations and social justice among his patronages. Its reflection says why: "Racism is a sin almost nobody confesses." Martin is a model, it says, of forgiveness for those who have been discriminated against and of justice for those who repent of discriminating. That is a double patronage, and it is the one to notice. He did not answer the insults with an argument. He answered them with a life nobody could argue with. If you have been treated as less than you are, he knows. If you have treated someone else that way, he is the saint to bring to Confession.
Forgiveness in his story is not weakness. He kept serving the people who called him a mulatto because the Gospel told him to, and Vatican News sums him up as the poor mulatto "who served the poor because he was one of them." Devotion has made him the patron of exactly the justice that kind of service builds.
How to pray to St. Martin de Porres
His optional memorial is November 3, the day of his death. Pray the nine days before it, or any day; the sources used here record no fixed novena of his own.
Say the prayer below and then do what he did. If the need is illness, see the doctor and take the medicine; Martin prepared medicines himself and would not understand a prayer used instead of them. If it is poverty, ask the parish and the agencies for help without shame; he fed two hundred people a day from a priory kitchen. If it is injustice, use the law, the union and the complaint, and ask him for the patience and the freedom from bitterness that the fight will need. If what you carry is your own prejudice, Confession is the first step and he is the saint to go with you. Bring all of it to Mass. He was devoted, the Dominican nuns say, to the Blessed Sacrament and to the Passion of the Lord, which is where the equal dignity of every person was settled once for all.