There took place in May the canonization of Martin de Porres, the mulatto, seventeenth-century, Dominican laybrother of Lima. We do not know for certain whether he was, by his coloured mother, of African or of Indian blood; the fact that he was usually called a mulatto, not a mestizo, rather suggests the former, and one may think there is something African about his laughter and gentleness. We do not even know for certain whether he was, technically, a laybrother, or simply a familiaris in the priory; he certainly took vows, but he seems always to have been referred to as a donatus, and the legislation of the Order at the time (for instance at the Chapters of 1580, 1642, and 1647) seems officially to have excluded half-castes from receiving the habit. But these details are of little significance by comparison with what he was in himself. The important thing is that he belonged to the class of the despised and the underprivileged. He was illegitimate, brought up in poverty, a coloured man; he spent his life doing chores. But he overcame all this by the sheer breadth of his charity. The Acts of the General Chapter of 1642, three years after his death set it on record that at his death ‘clergy and people came in great crowds, and kissed his feet and hands with tender devotion’. We know that he died at the moment that the words of the Creed were being sung: Et homo factus est, He became man. That is perhaps the great significance for our time of his long-awaited canonization. He had penetrated to the ultimate humanity of men, past the barriers of pride and cruelty, of oppression and resentment.