By Jay Sorgi • Posted November 5, 2025

They gathered to learn about a saint who reflects their journey, and fostered a belief that they can also offer God’s loving hand in a world with great need.

“St. Martin de Porres, humble servant of the Lord, you healed with your hands, but even more with your heart,” about 75 people prayed together on All Saints Day, Nov. 1, at the St. Martin de Porres Mini-Conference hosted by the archdiocesan Office for Black Catholics in the conference center at the National Shrine of St. John Neumann in Philadelphia.

“You saw no color lines, no stranger’s face, only the image of God shining in all creation. You opened doors to the hungry and the hurting,” the prayer continued. “You tended to the sick, the broken, and the forgotten. You remind us that holiness is service, and service is love.”

The saint, whose feast day was Monday, Nov. 3, was born to a Black and possibly indigenous mother and Spanish father in 1579 in Lima, Peru. He dedicated his life to service in the face of racism and poverty, even within his own religious order four centuries ago.

The dozens of attendees encountered musical performances and reflections from both St. Martin’s Peruvian and African heritage, talks reflecting the Black Catholic experience through the lens of St. Martin’s life, and an afternoon Mass to honor him and all the saints.

Dominican Brother Herman Johnson, a professor of Spanish at Xavier University of New Orleans which was founded by Philadelphia’s own St. Katharine Drexel, gave a talk centered around St. Martin de Porres’ mission and shared his encounter with what he believes was an apparition of the saint.

“All is subordinate to divine activity if we let it happen, if we respond,” said Brother Herman. His own calling to religious life came from a pamphlet dedicated to the saint at a time when New Orleans was not yet racially integrated.

“When I was 10 years old, my father, a male nurse, went into a hospital chapel and he saw a pamphlet of a Black saint. He brought it home and read me his story. Immediately, I knew for me to be me and be for others, I was to be a Dominican brother,” he said.

“His life, like your life … and my life, was hijacked by God.”

He said that he didn’t dare knock on the door of the Dominican friary in New Orleans at the time to join the order. Just like four centuries ago, St. Martin de Porres didn’t dare do the same.

The saint, considered to be nothing more than a servant at the time, still “stood out” enough to be allowed to be a tertiary member of the Dominican order.

“God does anything God wants. The Holy Spirit, like the Gospel, crashes away from the way we think,” Brother Herman said.

“When they saw that God was intimately favoring him, and showing God’s love through him, the Dominicans claimed him and gave him vows, but he was not a brother like me.”

Brother Herman told how St. Martin de Porres was “deputized” to teach and heal every member of Peruvian society through the Gospels, through simple acts of interpersonal compassion.

“He preached in the relational manner that he touched people,” said Brother Johnson. “That’s how he preached, in the relational manner that he healed people, in the relational manner that he saw everybody infused with divine life that should be respected.”

It took more than 330 years to canonize him after his death, with Pope John XXIII declaring him the first Black saint in the Americas.

“Divine love knows no color,” said Brother Herman, who said the saint appeared to him on July 11, 2014 at a hotel in Panama City, Panama.

“He had come to pay me a visit, simply to announce he was near me,” Brother Herman shared in an article he distributed to the attendees, “For the next hour and 50 minutes, I could not stop gazing at this man. ‘Wow, this really is Martin de Porres!’”

Dominican Father Victor Laroche, who celebrated the All Saints Day Mass, said that the saint was truly aiding our lives today.

“Allow St. Martin and the other saints to do for us what they can do best. They are interceding for us. They are praying for us,” said Father Laroche.

“They are guiding us along the way. They are welcoming us. Sometimes we don’t pay attention to that. So many times, even without asking.”

The conference participants certainly asked for intercession, as many of them will continue to do thanks to the testimony, reflection, and understanding given Saturday afternoon by men whose lives have been dedicated to God through the example of a humble saint who embodies their own experience.

“Pray for us, St. Martin de Porres,” the attendees prayed, “that we may heal what divides, forgive what wounds, and serve with the same sweet spirit that guided you.”