On November 3 the Church honors St. Martin de Porres (1579-1639), the Dominican lay brother of Lima, Peru, whose life of poverty, humility, and healing made him the patron of social justice and racial harmony in the Americas. Born in Lima of a Spanish father and a freed African-descended mother, he entered the Dominican Convento de Santo Domingo as a donado — a lay servant — because the racial laws of the colony barred him from full profession as a friar. He spent forty years there as barber, infirmarian, and almoner, and his reputation for miraculous healing spread through every class of Lima. He is estimated to have raised the dead, cured the sick, and bilocated to distant missions, and he founded a foundling hospital and an orphanage for Lima's abandoned children.
He died on November 3, 1639, and was buried in the Convento de Santo Domingo, where his relics are venerated to this day. He was canonized by Pope John XXIII on May 6, 1962. The Convento de Santo Domingo in Lima — the oldest Dominican foundation in the Americas, built 1540-1580 — holds both his tomb and that of St. Rose of Lima, making it the only church in the world that shelters the relics of three canonized saints who lived together in the same house.
