Homily for Memorial of St. Martin de Porres

Homily for the Memorial of
St. Martin de Porres
Tuesday, Week 31 of O.T.

Nov. 3, 2026
Collect
Phil 2: 5-11
Luke 14: 15-24
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph’s Residence, N.R.

Statue of St. Martin de Porres
(Calvary Hospital, Bronx)

God “led St. Martin de Porres by the path of humility to heavenly glory” (Collect).

As a poor, mixed-race, illegitimate son of a single mother, Martin couldn’t be admitted to religious life in 16th-century Lima.  He became a lowly volunteer in the Dominican convent of the Holy Rosary.  After 8 years, the prior allowed him to profess as a lay brother, and he continued his menial tasks.  He served scores of his brothers and everyone else who came to him in poverty or illness.  He gave his own bed to the sick on more than one occasion.  His care for sick friars had miraculous incidents.  Thruout Lima, he was known as “Martin the charitable.”

Martin was imitating Jesus, who “did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.  Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave” (Phil 2:6-7).  Jesus came to serve us and to give his life for us (Mark 10:45), and that lowliness led to the glorification of his humanity (Phil 2:9).

In the parable Jesus tells today, it’s the great ones of society, the arrogant and the rude, who lose out:  “none of those men … will taste my dinner” (Luke 14:24).  That great dinner to which many were invited (14:16), of course, is the banquet of eternal life.  Who enters the feast and partakes?  The poorest of society, the humble, anyone willing to accept the great man’s invitation to come in and fill the banquet hall (14:21-23).

The humble are exalted, as we heard in Saturday’s gospel (Luke 14:11).  The humble like Martin de Porres are lifted up to glory.  For the humble “have the same attitude that is in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5).