During the night of November 12

1555, A VERY GOOD YEAR FOR DIEGO DE ALCALA

ACHIEVING SAINTHOOD BY INCREMENTS

During the night of November 12, 1463, an agéd lay brother named Diego died within the walls of Santa María de Jesús, a Franciscan friary established less than a decade earlier in the Spanish city of Alcalá de Henares. Situated some forty kilometers northeast of Madrid, Alcalá would become home a half century later to one of the great universities of the early modern period, though at the time of Diego’s death, the city had not yet earned this major claim to fame. The deceased spent the closing decade of his long, but unremarkable career serving as the friary's gatekeeper, tending the sick and feeding the poor. There was little in his life to indicate that 125 years later, Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590), at the persistent urgings of King Philip II of Spain (1556-1598), would enroll him into that exclusive circle of men and women considered to be saints by the Roman Catholic Church.

Diego’s story falls into two chapters, each situated in a different century. If later accounts are correct in placing his birth around 1400 in a small village near Seville, then his lifespan extended over some six decades, lengthy by the standards of the day. It also proved relatively uneventful and is therefore almost entirely undocumented. Only two episodes stand out in the friar’s career, both known from later testimony by eyewitnesses: during the 1440s, he spent time working at a Franciscan mission in the Canary Islands and in 1450, he journeyed to Rome both to attend the Jubilee Year and celebrate the canonization of a major member of his order.

The four years immediately following Diego’s death (1463-1467) witnessed a flurry of activity during which the monastic community encouraged by its founder, the warrior-archbishop of Toledo, Alonso Carrillo (1412-1482), gathered information about the gentle friar with an eye to seeking sainthood. In 1467, this first chapter closed when efforts to canonize fell victim to Castilian politics. There followed a long hiatus, during which Diego’s remains sat undisturbed, but not forgotten in a small chapel built by a king said to have benefited from his intercession, Enrique IV of Castile (1454-1474). Throughout these decades, the friar was recognized as a local saint or beatus, venerated in the region around Alcalá, but virtually unknown beyond.

The second chapter, more dramatic and better documented, began in the summer of 1555, when the saint’s second most important miracle took place in his chapel, in a very public scene that ultimately inspired resurgence of interest in his cause. It involved the healing of a badly crippled, eighteen year old woman named María de la Peñuela who immediately afterwards took the veil in gratitude, becoming Sister María del Santo. That summer and fall, there followed a series of similar episodes, none quite as dramatic, but together rekindling the fervor of a new generation for the city’s beatus and setting the stage for the single most significant event on his pathway to sainthood.

This occurred on May 9, 1562, when the people of Alcalá removed Diego from the box where he had rested for nearly a century and carried him through the city streets in a solemn procession that ended in the sickroom of the Spanish prince, Don Carlos, son of Philip II. A month ealier, while residing in their city, the prince had sustained a head injury, one rendered life-threatening by the onset of infection. In an even more dramatic scene than that of 1555, the friar's corpse was laid down beside the royal patient, who, according to witnesses, rallied sufficiently to reach across, touch it, then draw his hand across his own severely infected face. That night, Carlos's condition, which had seemed hopeless, began to improve and the next morning, he told of a nocturnal visitation from Diego.

When the prince, despite all expectation, survived his injury, most Spaniards including himself and his father, credited the beatus with having miraculously interceded in his behalf. Within a year, a movement, led by the royal family, began to press for sainthood. Even after the tragic death of Don Carlos in 1568, Philip II continued to cajole and pressure four successive popes (Pius IV, Pius V, Gregory XIII, and Sixtus V) until, in 1588, the king overcame papal resistance and/or indifference and the last of these popes gave him his saint.

Throughout its history, Christianity has produced individuals on the fast track to sainthood. Members of this elite include high profile martyrs, successful missionaries, leading scholars, a few kings and popes, and, of course, founders of religious orders whose members usually keep alive the drive to have their founding father (or mother) canonized. Among Roman Catholics, a time-honored quip states that “if you wish to become a saint, found a religious order.” Currently on the fast track are Mother Theresa and Karol Wojtyla, the latter history’s saintmaker par excellence.

For others, the path is not as straightforward. A number, of whom Diego was one, must achieve their sainthood by increments. In earlier papers and articles, I have dealt at some length with three such incremental moments in the career of Diego de Alcalá. The first came during the days and months following his death. At that time, the record of kindness and charity to the people of Alcala and his patient suffering during a painful last illness led to an impressive outpouring of popular veneration followed almost immediately by his translation from the graveyard to the altar, the report of numerous miracles, and an official "inquisicion" aimed at canonization. Together, these tranformed a humble friar into a local saint.

Another key moment came in 1562, with the visit to the royal sickroom and the subsequent recovery of Prince Carlos. The final moment occurred in the years between 1585 and ’88 when the politics of Counter-Reformation Europe combined with the election of a Franciscan pope to put Diego “over the top.”

There is, however, a fourth incremental moment of great significance: the year 1555. Without the events of that year, it is hard if not impossible to conceive of what happened in 1562 actually happening.

III

The story of 1555 survives in a document preserved in two copies: one in the Escorial’s Real Biblioteca drafted at the instructions of Prince Carlos in 1562, immediately after his recovery; a second, in the full canonization process forwarded to Rome in 1567 and preserved in the Vatican Library. Although not specifically titled, I have called this document The Miracle Book of Diego de Alcalá since the majority is devoted to the pre-1562 miracles said to have been performed by the future saint. The first half contains the only fifteenth century mention of the saint known to have survived, including not only a record of what were thought to be 151 supernatural occurrences, most of them in the four years after his death and most involving healing, but also several brief eyewitness accounts of his career and a more detailed relation of the events surrounding his death. After 1467, The Miracle Book fell silent for the better part of a century; there would be only more entry for the next eighty-eight years.

Given the high production of saintly miracles in the later Middle Ages, just one reported at a shrine over the course of nearly nine decades might suggest the friar’s memory soon fell into eclipse. There is, however, compelling testimony from the canonization inquiries, conducted in 1565 and again in 1567, that throughout this period not only many townspeople, but also some outsiders flocked to the chapel to ask for Diego’s aid in times of adversity. According to these witnesses, such a traffic had been visible ever since the town’s beatus had died. What is more, it was widely believed that on more than a few occasions, the prayers had been answered, even if not duly recorded and notarized.

Then, in the year 1555, the silence ended. The Miracle Book recorded a renewed flurry of activity around the tomb, reminiscent of the mid-1460s. At the center lay the second most significant, but most-minutely documented of Diego’s miracles, the healing of eighteen year old María de la Peñuela, daughter of a well-off citizen (vecino) of Alcalá. For eleven months, the patient had suffered a multitude of infirmities, chief among them alternating paroxysms and paralysis. Her very public recovery in Diego’s chapel on the night of May 14, 1555, and her subsequent promise to the saint to take the veil, gave rise to a painstaking investigation by local officials in which all evidence collected pointed to a miracle. This spectacular incident was followed in succeeding months by nearly a dozen other new claims for divine intercession mediated by the friar.

Nearly eleven months of agony began for Doña María on July 1, 1554, when another young woman died in her parents’ home. This sudden death seemed to spark the onset of a truly remarkable catalogue of woes, including formidible seizures, convulsions, and muscle contractions, alternating with a near catatonic state. When she opened her eyes, they appeared wild and disoriented, “as if she were seeing something frightening.” A day or two into the illness, two local physicians, Pedro de Quiñones and Fernando de Mena, arrived at the Peñuela home, to examine the patient and begin treatment. Since the initial bout continued unremittingly for ten to twelve days, they spent the better part of two weeks there. They would later be joined by others of their profession, including various of Mena’s students at the university as well as another of his university colleagues, Dr. Cristobal de Vega, all of them curious to get a look at so strange an illness. According to Mena, the case was so grave that he was forced to tell the parents “although she would probably not die, she would remain crippled and paralyzed over half her body.”

The physicians bled the patient, purged her, cupped her, applied ointments; in short, utilized the whole array of treatments available to sixteenth century medicine. Although she survived the crisis, she emerged much altered for the worse. Most of her left side was paralyzed and without sensation. Her left arm became twisted, shrunken and fixed immovably to her chest. A similar thing happened to her left leg that bent back on itself in such a way that the heel almost touched the groin. Even feeling in her left ear vanished. In later depositions, one witness after another testified to having seen this grotesque sight and having tried, always without success, to straighten the victim’s twisted limbs. Dr. Quiñones tried when she was fully sensible and when she was having a seizure, in both instances to no avail.

Seizures continued; and while none lasted as long as the first, some endured for several hours. During these ordeals, Doña María’s eyes would roll back into her head. Afterwards she might temporarily lose her sight and the capacity to speak. She would vomit what she had most recently eaten and blood would trickle from her left ear. Even on her healthy right side, she experienced tremors and muscle contractions. Over time, other symptoms appeared. She suffered from severe headaches and obstructions in both her intestines and urinary duct. At one point, she went for more than a week without urinating. Her body swelled up. Meanwhile, continued treatment brought little or no relief, not to mention a cure.

After eleven months of trying, the patient’s doctors abandonned hope that their efforts could make any difference in her case. At this point, one or more of them appears to have recommended that their patient seek help from a higher source; that she appeal to Alcalá’s beatus to intercede in heaven on her behalf. By now in despair, the bed-ridden young woman decided to follow this course and begged her family to arrange for her to spend a night of prayer at Diego’s chapel. Throughout her illness, she had maintained a firm devotion, regularly confessing and taking communion in her home. While centered on the virgin, it had extended to the Fray Diego whose hand, preserved in a separate reliquary, had on one occasion been brought to her. Thus far, however, prayer had accomplished no more than medicine.

Then, on May 14, 1555, the family requested that she be allowed to pray at the tomb overnight, a request that the monastery’s guardian granted. Around 9 that evening, the patient was transferred to a bed on the ground floor and a group of men recruited by her father carried it through the streets. Since pain wracked her body and she experienced severe convulsions, the porters were greatly relieved when they deposited their burden in Diego’s chapel, just outside the chapel screen. Here, she remained in the care of her parents, several of the family’s serving girls, and Dr. Quiñones; and here, occurred the miracle.

On approaching the chapel, Doña María had broken into tears and repeatedly cried out to the dead friar, “Blessed Brother Diego, grant me this that I come to ask of you”—an emotional outburst that immediately brought on another seizure. While still in this trance, remarkable things began to transpire. First to notice was Dr. Quiñones, who discovered that his patient’s left arm had lost its rigidity and could be straightened in a way that had not been possible for months. He asked one of the serving girls, standing by the lower end of the bed, to check the patient’s leg and she found the same to be true: the left leg could now be easily moved out of its twisted state. Among the onlookers, whispers about a miracle began. Having arrived to check on the patient’s condition, Dr. Mena was also encouraged, but cautioned against prematurely attributing it to a miracle. Although he remained for a time, Mena was tired from a long day’s work and eventually, went home to bed. As a result, he missed most of the extraordinary proceedings that followed, though he learned of them the following morning.

When Doña María returned to consciousness (buelto en si), she did not at first realize what had happened. Those gathered around her, in particular. Quiñones, told her that both of her paralyzed limbs had been straightened and asked if she had any feeling in them. The dazed young woman, still without sensation on the left side, did not at first believe the onlookers. But finding her arms and legs moved from their long frozen position, she began to cry out in a loud voice giving thanks to god and was joined by the others.

Hearing the commotion, the guardian returned to the church where he ordered the friars to pray that the patient would be fully cured. When she begged that her bed be placed as close as possible to the tomb, he permitted it, if only to protect her from being jostled by a growing crowd of spectators. Several friars lifted her in a mattress and placed it within the screened off area, then joined others in wrestling the wooden bed frame through until it almost touched the tomb. Once inside, Doña María again addressed the friar, praying fervently for a cure.

Around ten o’clock with the situation seemingly stabilized, a number of watchers, including the patient’s father, decided to go home and get some sleep. Having heard of another case where, as a precursor to miraculous healing, the beneficiary had sweated profusely, María’s mother, who stayed by the bedside, now ran her hand over her daughter’s body and found it to be sweating along the paralyzed left side, but not on the right. A few moments later, the patient cried out that she saw Brother Diego and rising without help first to her knees, then to her feet, she moved across the bed toward the friar’s sarcophagus, clapping her hands delightedly while asking, “Don’t you see the blessed saint, Brother Diego, who is calling me? Don’t you see him?” Reaching the tomb before anyone could react, she stuck her left hand into a small opening between the massive outer box that enclosed the friar and a smaller wood casket that contained the friar’s body.

At this point, both Quiñones and the guardian rushed forward to stop this seeming intrusion into the resting place of their local beatus. Expecting to meet little resistance, both tried to gently pull her hand loose from the box. Their first attempts met with failure. Both men later testified to their astonishment that anyone as weak as the patient could so resist their efforts. A disturbance again broke out among the witnesses, during which María said “Don’t you see that that the saint has hold of me; that he wants my hand?” Eventually, when the hand was disengaged, they discovered that the lost sensation had returned. Seeing this, the girl immediately fell to her knees before the tomb, tearfully crying out thanks to the saint. When the guardian called the friars together and ordered them to sing, María silenced them, saying that she had to listen to what the saint was saying. When urged to return to her bed, she refused, explaining that she must now do as commanded. Thus began her procession around the church on her knees, covered only by her shift and the doctor’s short jacket, periodically stopping to beat her breasts or raise her hands to heaven or press down against the ground, fervently kissing the stone floor, all the time surrounded by the friars chanting their te deum. From the chapel, to the statue of the virgin, to the main altar, to the grave of the young woman whose death had touched off María’s illness, and back to the chapel, this procession wound its way through the church. As word spread that something marvellous was happening there, despite the hour, people began to arrive; a trickle at first, it became a flood when María had the church bells rung at Brother Diego’s command. Thus, the most public of all Diego’s miracles was accomplished with virtually the entire population of Alcalá in attendance.

Within a day, there followed a second installment. Having temporarily forgotten her promise to maintain virginity in return for the saint’s benevolence, María experienced a second vision of Diego during which he gently reminded her of the vow and called upon her to make a public declaration. Escorted to the high altar by the guardian, she announced in a firm voice her intention to take the veil, while telling all of her recent experience. In multiple sittings, she testified before a local notary, who eventually deposed eleven witnesses, including the physicians, all of whom believed they had witnessed a miracle. The debriefing went on for nine days, after which Doña María kept her vow. The Franciscan friars formed another procession escorting her to the convent of San Juan de la Penitencia where she became Sister María del Santo. During these latest proceedings, a Dominican friar and professor of theology at the university, Fra Mancio de Corpus Christi, was asked to preach in the cathedral that a miracle had occurred. Despite initial hesitation, after examining the evidence, he agreed to do so. Meanwhile, the people of Acalá rejoiced that their beatus had brought about two more, duly notarized miracles. There would be more to follow.

Between July, 1555, and the following June, eight other people experienced what they regarded as miraculous healings. Most occurred at the chapel, but one took place at a distance: a weaver (oficial de texador) from Madrid was cured of a year-long deafness simply by promising a journey to Diego’s tomb (a promise he later kept). None of the succeeding miracles had anywhere near the same dramatic impact. Most of the beneficiaries had been inspired by la Peñuela to make their appeal to Brother Diego and several of their cases actually ressembled hers. Together, however, they contributed to a resurgent interest in the town’s beatus. All were duly recorded and added to The Miracle Book. In short, 1555 proved to be a very good year for Diego.

Let me conclude by briefly expanding upon a statement I made earlier: that without the events of 1555 what happened in 1562 would probably not have happened. Before discovering the complete canonization process two years ago, I wondered just why Philip II had ordered the body of this obscure local figure brought to the sickroom. Many towns in Spain could lay claim to similar beati, holy men and women sanctioned by local tradition rather than the international church. It is unlikely that before arriving in Alcalá, the king had ever heard of the city’s would-be saint. Hence, he was almost certainly acting on someone else’s advice. But whose? According to the Venetian ambassador, it was the Duke of Alba who had planted the idea; but again, this seemed unlikely since the duke had no particular connection with the city.

On the other hand, a physician in attendance was far better placed than the ambassador or the duke to know the facts. He later swore that it was Don Carlos himself who, having earlier learned of Diego, now desired the body brought into his presence. The identity of this physician is critical: he was one of three who had been on the case from the beginning. Two of those men, Diego Olivares and Daza Chacon, have left the principal accounts of the injury, accounts that rank among the finest such writing from the sixteenth century. But it is the third man who interests us: Dr. Cristobal de Vega. The same Dr. de Vega who had participated in the treatment of María de la Peñuela and who, like the principal physicians saw the outcome as a miracle. His later testimony, strongly supporting canonization, pictured a lifelong connection with the friar, similar to that of many other inhabitants of Alcalá. After all, he had been born and lived most of his life there and had always heard the friar spoken of as a saint.

In 1557, based on his prominence in the university, Vega had secured a position in the royal household, and soon found himself as one of the medical staff assigned to treat the sickly prince. By his own admission, throughout treatment of the injury, he had repeatedly entered Diego’s chapel, to pray for his royal patient. In short, if anyone had planted an idea into a royal head, it would have been Dr. de Vega into that of Don Carlos. When the prince arrived in his home town, the doctor would undoubtedly have introduced him to the town’s most famous son whose supernatural power he believed he himself had witnessed in an earlier case. And when medicine proved unequal to the task, the good doctor, having witnessed one miracle, could be expected to recommend to his dying patient that such a visit could only be for the good.

Nor was de Vega the only physician treating Carlos who had experience with the friar’s power. As Philip rode out from Madrid on the night of May 2 to reach his stricken son, he brought with him his own personal physician, Dr. de Mena, who joined the team the following morning. Although no first name is given in the medical accounts, there is no doubt that this was the same Dr. Fernando de Mena who had treated la Pañuela seven years earlier. According to Doña Maria’s 1567 testimony, after her recovery, the de Mena who had tried (and failed) to cure her, had entered royal service as physician to Philip II. In 1555, when the monastery had gathered evidence in the Pañuela case, Mena had been one of the most important witnesses, testifying to his firm belief that where medicine had failed, a miracle had saved his patient.

And there is yet a third connection as well, at least as important as the other two. Fra Mancio of the Dominican order, the theologian who had proclaimed la Peñuela’s miracle at her entry into the convent, had since become the prince’s confessor. As such, he remained in the sickroom for days on end confessing the patient when his condition became grave and giving spiritual comfort. According to later testimony, when the medical team gave up hope, it was he along with the the king’s spiritual adviser and the rector of the university who fervently recommended to the grieving monarc that Brother Diego’s earthly remains to the palace.

In short, once again either God or fortune had smiled on the friar, setting the stage for the second of two journeys that together would bring him into the celestial circle. The first in 1463 had transferred him from an obscure grave to the altar of the monastery and to local beatitude. The second, in 1562, brought him to the royal sickroom, and would eventually carry him to canonization. Joining the two were the events of 1555, an incremental link in the chain leading to sainthood.

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