Vigils Reading – St Martin of Finojosa
SAINT MARTIN OF FINOJOSA
By Thomas Merton
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Saint Martin Sacerdos of Finojosa, Abbot of Huerta, Bishop of Siguenza,
Spain, was born in the year 1139 and grew up under the care of a most loving and
pious Christian mother with his brother, a courtier and knight, and his two
sisters Theresa and Eve. Instead of following the usual aspirations to
knighthood, Martin was fonder of books and meditation and solitude, and this
bent of his was definitely turned into a vocation to the cloister when his father
died. The shock of this loss fixed his mind on eternity, and despising all that the
world had to offer, he made known his intentions to his mother and brother. He
was then twenty years old.
At first he met with nothing but opposition. However, when they saw that
he was firm in his purpose, his family did not have the impiety to resist him
further, and his mother made a most generous and willing sacrifice of him,
taking him to the Abbey of Cantavos and there leaving him with all the
ceremonies prescribed by Saint Benedict for presenting the children of the rich
to the monastery. Martin, meanwhile, took the Mother of God in exchange for
his earthly mother and adopted as his motto for the novitiate: “What you begin,
begin perfectly”…
Although he was only twenty-six, Sacerdos was elected by the monks to
succeed the abbot… <His history as abbot> comes to us through official
documents which tell us less of his virtues than of the fame of them and the
effects of that fame. We read everywhere of the veneration in which he was held
by the royalty and nobility of all Spain…
It was with the greatest distaste that Saint Sacerdos learned, in 1186, that
he had been elected bishop of Siguenza. He only accepted this position under
orders from Rome… In 1194, however, Saint Sacerdos persuaded the Pope to
accept his resignation and was able to return to the peace and tranquility of
Huerta, where he could fill his soul with the infinite sweetness of the presence of
God and hide himself in the secret of His face, of whom the psalmist said: “Thou
dost protect them in Thy tabernacle against the contradiction of tongues.”
And that Face, of which we read in the same Psalm…is nothing else but
the divine Essence, in which we lose ourselves in the luminous darkness of faith,
which covers us and makes us invisible to our enemies – and sometimes to
ourselves. And so, in these years, Saint Sacerdos was often rapt out of himself in
the ecstasy of divine contemplation.
Death finally overtook him in 1210 when he was on a visitation of his
monastery of Óvila. He felt the end approaching and set out for Huerta but did
not complete his journey, for he died on the way. His venerated body was
received with great circumstance by his grieving children and buried in the great
church of the abbey.
In 1558 his body was found completely uncorrupted, along with the
clothing and crozier with which he had been buried. He was formally beatified
with the title of saint and inscribed in the Roman Martyrology in 1584.