Foreword to Sr Maeve McMahon’s biography of St Martin de Porres
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At his canonization in May 1962, Saint Martin de Porres was presented to the world by Pope John XXIII as exemplifying what he, the Pope, desired for the Second Vatican Council, due to open a few months later. What we want from the council, he said, is a new incentive to members of the Church to live a better life, a life of greater holiness and virtue. The Council was to inaugurate a spiritual renewal in the first place, and in choosing to canonize Martin when he did, Pope John was holding him up as an example, a teacher and a guide for the Council’s work.
Far from his own time and place, then, this humble mixed-race man, was recognised not just as a hero of the Christian way but as a hero for our times too. He lived the great commandment – love God, love your neighbour – in a heroic way: that was the simple and profound ‘secret’ of his holiness.
During his lifetime Martin de Porres won the hearts of all who knew him, whatever their race, origin or social position. Personally he had to negotiate some of the deepest prejudices with which the human race lives: racial, social, cultural. Sixty years after his canonization, Martin still helps us in responding to the great challenges the world continues to face. Racism, for example, in regard to which Martin has always been a particular comfort to those who suffer under it and a particular challenge to those who would promote it. As a lover of animals and a man close to nature, using its resources to bring healing to the sick, he stands with Francis of Assisi as a champion in the care of creation. As a man of many cultures he shows us how to live inter-culturally, allowing the simple teaching of the Gospel to strengthen our appreciation of diversity and our recognition of equality among all human beings. Pope Francis, the first pope from Latin America, knows well the history of marginalization and exclusion that has marked the experience of the people of that continent. But he also knows well how holiness lived at the peripheries and on the margins, the kind of holiness Martin represents, will transform the whole Church as Martin helped to transform the Church in Peru during his lifetime.
Martin’s wisdom – ‘he is a learned man’, one of his Dominican confreres said about him – flowed from his faith, his love for God, and the particular graces that God gave him. His response in every situation came directly from his lifelong friendship with God, creator of all and saviour of all. Martin saw everybody and everything in that theological light. Like Jesus, whom he loved with his whole heart from his earliest years, he wanted to be a bearer of love and a maker of peace in the violent world in which he found himself.
Learning from Martin, then, why would we ever make distinctions that exclude or oppress others? Why would we ever fail to welcome strangers, feed the hungry, visit the sick? Why would we ever fail to appreciate the variety in all that God has made since, in seeing it all, God found it to be ‘very good’?
Sister Maeve McMahon now follows up her lovely life of Saint Dominic, published some years ago, with this fresh and energetic retelling of the life of Saint Martin de Porres. For the reasons already given Martin is very much a saint for our times and Sister Maeve’s account of his life – simple and inspiring, in places surprising and thought-provoking – will help a new generation to know, to love, and to be challenged by this great man, Martin of Charity. We read that he was able to enter even where doors were locked. May this account of his life nourish minds and open hearts so that, for a new generation, Martin will be a leader, a teacher and a guide in the way of holiness.
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