Saint John of Sahagún

From his earliest youth, he gave such great signs of holiness that all who saw him asked (as was done in the past regarding Saint John) what this child would one day be, who already seemed to possess the wisdom and piety of a man advanced in virtue. He had no inclination for play; he avoided the company of those his age so as not to participate in their amusements; he delighted in solitary places and took singular pleasure in attending the ceremonies of the Church. If he was obliged to be with his fellow students in small, innocent gatherings, he would correct them for their faults with such grace and at such appropriate times that no one was offended; he also settled all their little disputes.

His talent for preaching already appeared in the small exhortations he gave to his fellow students. To support these fine dispositions, his parents entrusted him to the care of the religious of the monastery of Saint-Primitif and Saint-Facond, of the Order of Saint Benedict; it was there that he received his first lessons in grammar, and subsequently in philosophy and theology. After his studies, although he was still young, his father, who held a right of patronage over a benefice in Dornillo, conferred it upon his son, according to the custom, or rather, the abuse of the time. But the young man soon had scruples regarding this benefice, the duties of which he could not fulfill. He threw himself at his father's feet, imploring him to relieve his conscience by allowing him to renounce it: which was granted to him.

When he was twenty years old (1439), Alfonso of Cartagena, Bishop of Burgos, provided him with a canonry in his cathedral: he was ordained a priest six years later. Besides his cure and his canonry, other benefices were conferred upon him; but the Saint made the best use of them: he lived in extreme poverty and distributed almost all his wealth to the poor; nevertheless, he was not on the true path of perfection: grace having opened his eyes, he resigned his benefices and obtained permission from his bishop to retire to Salamanca; he studied theology there for four years, after which he was called to pre aching and Salamanque City where he taught and entered religious life. other priestly duties in the parish of Saint-Sebastian. His zeal had the greatest success; he inspired in all a horror of vice and a love of virtue. He gained an extraordinary reputation: he was regarded as a Saint sent from heaven. He said Mass with such tender feelings of devotion that, unable to contain his tears, he also moved to tears all those who attended his sacrifice; everyone commended themselves to his prayers.

John lived with a virtuous canon (Peter Sanchez), where he had the freedom to practice great austerities. After nine years, he had to suffer the cruel pains of the stone; he consented to undergo the operation; but beforehand, he made a vow that if he emerged safe and sound, he would become a religious. God permitted that it was not only successful, but also very little painful.

Scarcely was the Saint in a condition to walk in the city, when a very poorly dressed poor man presented himself to him, who asked him for alms in the name of God. John imitated Saint Martin: of two garments he had, he gave the best to this unfortunate man. The following night, he received a heavenly visit so extraordinary that his soul and all his faculties felt effects that he himself could not explain: "God alone," he said, "knows what passed between Him and my soul; for me, I can say nothing, except that I have never received a sweeter contentment, and that I would have willingly wished that my whole life had been accompanied by such an agreeable favor."

From the next morning, John went to ask to be received at the monastery of the Order of S aint Augustine, to fulf Ordre de Saint-Augustin Religious order occupying the priory during the Middle Ages. ill the vow he had made, and to acknowledge, in the silence of religious retreat, the favors he had received from heaven. As his merit was well known, he was received with open arms; the superior and the whole community thanked God for this rich gift (1463). He was entrusted to the care of the master of novices, who found in this new disciple all the docility, wisdom, and zeal that one could wish for in a young man who, renouncing the world, no longer wants to think of anything but following the path of the greatest Saints. He made such rapid progress in virtue, and he rendered himself so agreeable in the eyes of God, that he was favored, from that time on, with the gift of miracles; for the prior of the monastery having entrusted him with the care of expenses and provisions, and all things having become extremely expensive in that year, which was entirely sterile, the novice, to provide for the needs of the religious, multiplied, by the mere sign of the cross, for the space of several months, the wine of a vessel that could not naturally have lasted eight days.

He made his solemn vows on August 28, 1464; he was from then on so deeply imbued with the spirit of the Rule that no one in the monastery carried mortification, obedience, humility, and detachment from creatures further than he did. He was soon entrusted with the office of novice master, which he exercised with great gentleness and prudence. A few months later, he was elected definitor by the Fathers of his province, assembled in a chapter, and he discharged this office so prudently that it was given to him seven different times in succession; and, finally, he was named prior of the convent in the city of Salamanca; it was then that he exercised with even greater freedom the zeal he had always shown for exact regularity. He never commanded anything whose practice was not seen in his own person, and he used such gentle severity when it was necessary to correct some fault that everyone obeyed his remonstrances. If he succeeded with such success in government, it is because his great zeal was accompanied by profound knowledge; for he had studied thoroughly, as we have said, philosophy, theology, and law under excellent masters. Such knowledge is necessary to govern others. John commanded all the better because he knew how to obey. Although he was highly regarded in his province for his rare merit, he was no sooner out of office than he resumed the humblest practices of a simple religious; and his historian does not hesitate to say that he regarded the smallest faults committed against the Rule as apostasies. He had such a high esteem for the virtue of obedience that, having one day failed, by chance, to receive permission from his prior to remain a little longer in a place where he had gone for good reasons, he felt such great pain that he locked himself in a room secretly, depriving himself of food and drink, speaking to no one, and even abstaining from saying the Holy Mass for two days: he had requested, for this purpose, permission in due form from his superior; this great religious did not believe he could perform a good deed without the approval of his superiors. This spirit of dependence was founded on a profound humility that made him believe he had no rights on earth, and that he could do nothing by himself; he considered and called himself the most despicable of all men, and, if he was forced to acknowledge all the graces with which God favored him, he asserted that the mercies he received from heaven were so many remedies granted to his weakness; and he added that if he had been less miserable, he would not have been so favored by God. He had a conscience so clear and delicate that he confessed the smallest imperfections as if they were very great sins. He could not suffer anything, however small it might be, to be done against justice; he wanted even a denarius to be restored; he would not receive alms from married women without the consent of their husbands. Our Saint had received from heaven a gift of very sublime contemplation, which made him spend entire nights in the sweetness of ecstasy, often appearing to be raised several feet above the ground. He also had a great facility for performing miracles: in Salamanca, a child fell by chance into a very deep well. The Saint, being touched with compassion, prayed and stretched his belt over the edge of the well: immediately, in the presence of a large crowd, the water of the well swelled, rose to the top, and cast out the child, safe and sound, whom his parents received weeping with joy. This gift of miracles gave John a great reputation: he was called the holy man everywhere. This caused him so much pain that, to attract contempt in place of these praises, it happened more than once that he feigned madness, a conduct of which we can only admire the intention.

This fervent religious had a very particular devotion to the Blessed Sacrament of the altar; all his actions during the day were so many dispositions and preparations to receive more worthily the delicious food of this holy table; besides this habitual preparation, he was accustomed to spend in prayer all the time that remained to him, from the completion of the Office of Matins until the break of day: which served as his immediate preparation to then celebrate the Holy Mass. He received very intimate and quite singular communications in the frequenting of this divine Sacrament; he had the advantage, as the lessons of his office remark, of seeing sensibly, with his bodily eyes, the adorable body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who seemed to lift for him the veils of this august mystery, to specially favor this holy religious, whose faith was incomparable; Jesus Christ then appeared to him more radiant than the sun, and his holy wounds more brilliant than the stars. He merited to receive very sublime knowledge concerning the greatness of this divine sacrifice of our altars, and his history adds that Our Lord even favored him with several familiar colloquies, which were evident proofs of the very close union that existed between Jesus Christ, in this Sacrament, and this holy personage. Saint Thomas of Villanova, Archbishop of Valencia, is an irreproachable witness of these facts, and one of t Saint Thomas de Villeneuve Archbishop of Valencia and Augustinian friar renowned for his charity. hose who subsequently published them highly for the edification of the people. The inexplicable sweetnesses that he thus tasted, during the time of the holy sacrifice, after the consecration, were the reason that he took much more time than other priests to celebrate the Holy Mass; his superiors reprimanded him for it and even forbade him to be so long, because everyone was complaining about it. The holy religious obeyed; he suffered for some time the deprivation of the consolations he enjoyed; but, finally, he went to ask his superior very humbly to leave him the freedom to say the Holy Mass in his usual way, and to lift the prohibition that had been placed upon him, because he had a just impediment that did not allow him to be brief; the superior not acquiescing to his request, the Saint found himself constrained to open his secret to him and to declare the favors he enjoyed, which obliged the prior to leave him perfect freedom in the celebration of the holy sacrifice.

It was in prayer and communion that this excellent religious drew the apostolic strength that appeared in his preaching; he rebuked vice whenever he encountered it, and in this he spared neither his friends nor those of high dignity: to do otherwise, he said, is to sell one's conscience, to betray the Crucifix, and to mint, so to speak, counterfeit currency in matters of religion. This apostolic boldness not having pleased a Spanish nobleman, whose vice he had blamed in public without, however, naming the person, this lord sent two assassins to put him to death on a road where he was to pass; but the two murderers, wishing to approach the Saint to execute their order, found themselves so suddenly struck by a terror whose cause they did not understand, and, moreover, the horses upon which they were mounted remained in such an inability to move forward, that these wretches finally recognized that God was fighting for the innocent; this was the cause of their conversion and that of their master, who wept for his fault and even gave great gifts to the Saint to testify to his goodwill.

Women, whose luxury and criminal liberties he had blamed, surrounded him one day in such great numbers that they were resolved to stone him: which they would have executed had not archers, who were sent, prevented them; but the Saint, who asked for nothing better than to die for the defense of the truth, said to those who were avenging him that they would do him a favor to let his enemies be, and that God could not grant him a greater grace than to die for His glory while rebuking the sins that dishonor Him: He will not hold me to account, he added, for the evils that I have been made to suffer; but He will reward me for the patience with which I have suffered them; do not divert the crown suspended over my head, and do not harm me by defending me. The continual dangers to which he was exposed every day, while inveighing against the disorders he knew of, did not prevent him from undertaking to restore to the city of Salamanca the peace it had long since lost. He had already, in the past, appeased a sedition in this same city; but a few years later, one of the most stubborn civil wars ever seen arose. Two parties divided the whole city; there was not a day that there was not an abundance of blood spilled, even relatives were opposed to one another, and as there was no woman who had not suffered some loss in these private combats, so there was no house that did not seek means of revenge; so that in every encounter one saw massacres and assassinations, and the evil was all the greater because the magistrates and even royal authority were no longer respected; homicides were committed with impunity, places of asylum and refuge were no longer considered privileged, and people went boldly to take vengeance and publicly spill the blood of their enemy even on the steps of the altars where the holy mysteries were celebrated.

John of Saint-Facond, finding the city of Salamanca in this sad state, and groaning over the miserable fate of so many afflicted noble families, mounted the pulpit, animated by his usual zeal; he omitted nothing to reunite the opposing parties Jean de Saint-Facond Spanish Augustinian friar, renowned preacher and peacemaker. and stop the spirit of vengeance that occupied those who were involved; but he worked for a long time without fruit, each believing that it was cowardice and a stain on his family not to make his enemy feel as many evils as one had received. God, nevertheless, finally wished to show mercy to the city, in consideration of the prayers and labors of His Saint; seditious people having had the audacity to stir up new quarrels in the Church itself, and at the time he was preaching and exhorting to union, this apostolic preacher, animated by the zeal for the house of God that devoured him, stopped short, apostrophized with a voice of thunder those who were exciting the tumult and who were beginning to lay hands on their weapons, and told them, in a prophetic tone, to cease their revolt and their noise immediately; otherwise, the first who would be so bold as to draw his sword would die that very instant. One of the most stubborn, despising the just threat of the Saint and having dared to draw his sword from its scabbard, died on the spot, to the great astonishment of everyone; this punishment, so public and so miraculous, made all minds return to themselves, and imprinted in them such a great fear of the judgments of God, that they thought only of abandoning their claims, of reconciling with one another, and of maintaining a perfect peace thereafter; it is thus that God used this apostolic man to restore to the city of Salamanca the blessing of peace of which it had been deprived for several years, and which three kings of Spain had uselessly attempted to procure, as the lessons of his office state.

The Saint, after having put an end to the disunion of spirits, preached against other disorders that could have been in part the cause of the first ones of which we have just spoken; and as the vice of impurity has always been one of the principal ones that drew an infinity of curses upon cities, he began to speak against voluptuousness and concubinage; he bore much fruit through his sermons; but he succeeded even more effectively through his visits and conversations. He went with courage and a boldness full of wisdom to seek out the wayward persons in their place of retreat, and, by showing them so effectively the horror of their disorders, he made, by this means, innumerable conversions. He spoke angelically of the virtue of purity, so necessary to all persons who profess Christianity, and gave everyone a holy desire to be chaste; and as it was one of the virtues he loved the most, divine Providence also willed that he should become, in some manner, a martyr of purity, as we are about to recount.

There was in the city of Salamanca a nobleman who was leading, with a debauched woman, the most scandalous life. No one dared to rebuke them: the blessed John of Saint-Facundus, fortified by that spirit which once animated Saint John the Baptist when he rebuked Herod, took the liberty of declaring to them, without fear, that it was no longer permitted for them to live in such a way, and that, if they continued, the sovereign Judge would take vengeance for it. His remonstrances finally touched this nobleman: he returned from his blindness, and left the creature who was the cause of his ruin; but this debauched woman conceived so much hatred against the one who had broken off her criminal commerce, that she swore to cause his death before a year had passed. To execute her guilty design, she found a way to make the servant of Jesus Christ swallow a slow poison; God, who wished to reward the zeal and labor of the new apostle, permitted the poison to produce its full effect. After having suffered several months of languor with admirable patience, John finally rendered his spirit to Him for whom he was sighing alone, while pronouncing these words: "Lord, I place all my trust in you in this last hour, and I commend my spirit into your hands"; which happened on June 11 of the year 1479.

This kind of death, and the cause for which he suffered it, have led many of his historians and panegyrists to say that he deserved to be honored with the quality and the halo of a Martyr.

The entire city of Salamanca rushed to the church where he was exposed. Everyone wanted to have something that belonged to him; armed men had to be stationed to moderate the fervor of the people's devotion, who were eager to cut pieces from his clothes or parts of his body. His history assures that at the moment his body was lowered into the burial place intended for him, all the sick who had come to obtain a remedy for their ailments through his merit recovered their health.

His historian reports a multitude of other miracles, all the more genuine as several sovereign Pontiffs, such as Paul III, Pius V, Gregory XIII, and Clement VIII, approved them after very exact examinations. These great wonders were performed by merely invoking the name of the Saint, wherever one might be, or by going to his tomb, or by applying a little of the earth where his precious body rested; the blind, even those born blind, recovered their sight there, the deaf and the mute received hearing and speech there, the paralyzed, the lame, and those who had deformities that deprived them of the company of other men found infallible remedies for their ailments, and several dead were resurrected.

A young nobleman, named Martin Arias Maldonado, who did not believe in all that was published regarding the miracles of the Saint, went one day to his tomb and feigned, out of contempt, to have a sick arm, begging the religious to let him place this limb, which he claimed was sick, into the Saint's tomb, as other infirm people did; a surprising thing, and one that was effective in drawing this reckless young man away from his libertinism! No sooner was his arm in the place where health was received than he was struck, in an instant, with the illness he feigned to have: his arm became paralyzed, dry, withered, and so stiff that he could neither bend nor move it; the people, upon knowing the cause, gave no fewer blessings to the divine wisdom for having made sick, on this occasion, one who was well, than for having granted health to others who were sick. This accident was a greater proof of all the wonders that had occurred previously. The libertine recognized and wept bitterly for his fault, promised to convert and to honor the Saint he had wished to despise, and, in this disposition, sincerely asking again for the healing of his arm, he received it on the spot in the presence of everyone, who could not sufficiently admire the mercies and wisdom of God.

He is represented: 1st with a chalice in his hand, above which one sees a shining host appear, to mark the favors the Blessed received in the participation of the holy mysteries; 2nd with a cup surmounted by a serpent, to indicate that he died of poison; 3rd with a demon under his feet, to make understood the triumphs he won over the enemy of salvation; 4th trampling the world and the demon, or the personification of discord, because of the war he waged against the infernal spirits through his tireless zeal; 5th with one or more swords at his feet, to recall the appeasement of hatreds and discord.

[APPENDIX: CULT AND RELICS.]

The prodigies that occurred at his tomb prompted Clement VIII to beatify this illustrious servant of Jesus Christ, whose merit heaven declared in so many ways, and permitted the province of Castile to recite his office and celebrate his Mass, by a brief of June 15, 1601. This permission was subsequently granted to the entire Augustinian Order by another brief of October 15, 1603.

The members of the famous University of Salamanca chose this Saint as their patron, and resolved, by vow and oath, in a general assembly, to celebrate the feast of the Saint each year, in perpetuity, as a Sunday. The city of Sahagun also took him as its patron. He is invoked against kidney stones.

Fifty-four years after his death, his holy body was raised, with permission, to be placed in a more honorable location; at that moment, a very pleasant odor spread, which caused new joy to all those present. The relics of his body, which were sent to distant provinces and kingdoms, to princes and churches that requested them, preserved this same odor everywhere.

Peru, in America, where some of these precious relics were taken, received extraordinary favors through the merits of this Saint; the first miracles that occurred at the time of his death were renewed there, and entire cities were delivered from the cruel plague that was depopulating them; these cities, as well as several others in the East Indies, which had received great help through the merits of this distinguished servant of God, took him as their patron.

The Blessed John was canonized in 1690 by Pope Alexander VIII. Benedict XIII ordered his office to be inserted into the Roman Breviary, under the double rite, on June 12.

We have composed this summary from the life of the Saint, inserted in the Chronicle of the Saints of the Order of Saint Augustine, and from the lessons of the offi ce that is per Alexandre VIII Pope cited in the text as having canonized the saint in 1658. formed with the permission of the Church in the same Order. — See the Bollandists, vol. II, June, p. 616; the life of this Saint, by Fr. Nicolas Robine, religious of the same Order, Paris, 1693.