Martin De Porres: Lay‐Brother (1579–1639)

Extract

There is so sharp a glare of the miraculous about Blessed I Martin of Lima, and sometimes such a haze of mere emotionalism, that it is hard to see the man as he was, the hard-working, patiently enduring Dominican lay-brother in the flesh. What follows is an attempt to depict him as he appeared to his contemporaries, and is based on ten of the seventy-six accounts given twenty years after his death at the Diocesan enquiry by people who knew him.

The background needs to be realised: a huge old Spanish-style convent, its several hundred religious occupied in all the work needed in a city of the New World: preaching, teaching, care of orphans, children, poor, sick. Lima, even when Martin died at the age of sixty, had existed a bare hundred years, a city of Spanish immigrants or first descendants of the conquistadores, merchants, soldiers, religious of every description. Side by side with these lived the dispossessed Indians, the imported Negro slaves. In the priory were not only religious, but the boys they looked after, and men staying there on retreat or learning a trade. There were Negro servants in the kitchen and the laundry and at all the menial tasks in the place. The Dominicans themselves comprised priests, student-novices (from fourteen and upwards), lay-brothers, and donados (not strictly religious, but ‘familiars’ living in the house). They had their cells; not necessarily small rooms, but places with alcoves and closets off them shared by visitors and children.