For our Province St. Martin whose feast we celebrated this month plays an important role. Our grade school bears the name of St. Martin de Porres and is the patron. On this day the festivities at the school have been curtailed due to Hurricane Sandy. The memory of St. Martin lives on in so many ways.
Saint MartÃn de Porres was noted for tireless work on behalf of the poor, establishing an orphanage and a children's hospital. He maintained an austere lifestyle, which included fasting and abstaining from meat. His devotion to prayer was notable even by the pious standards of the age. Among the many miracles attributed to him were those of levitation, bilocation, miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures and an ability to communicate with animals.
St. Martin de Porres became the patron saint of hairdressers because cutting hair was one of the duties he performed for his Brothers in the friary.
St. Martin de Porres was born at Lima, Peru, in 1579. His father was a Spanish gentleman and his mother a black freed-woman from Panama. At fifteen, he became a lay brother at the Dominican Friary at Lima and spent his whole life there - as a barber, farm laborer, and infirmarian among other things.
