Diego de Alcala
Fray Diego de San Nicolás, OFM., known as San Diego de Alcalá (San Nicolás del Puerto, November 14, 1400 - Alcalá de Henares, November 13 1463), was a Spanish Franciscan friar considered a saint by the Catholic Church.
He wore the Franciscan habit as a lay brother in the Order of Friars Minor of the Observance. He was a missionary in the Canary Islands, where he came to occupy the position of guardian of the convent.
He was canonized by Pope Sixtus V in 1588 in the first canonization carried out by the Catholic Church after the creation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. He is considered patron of the Franciscan lay brothers (non-clerics) for having been the first canonized lay brother in the Order.
Its celebration takes place on November 13.
Biography
He was born at the beginning of the 15th century into a modest family, in the town of San Nicolás del Puerto, in the north of the province of Seville and in the heart of the Sierra Morena. His parents, of Christian faith, gave him the name Diego, a derivation of Santiago, patron saint of Spain.
San Sebastian Parish of San Nicolás del Puerto.
Baptism of the San Sebastian Parish of San Nicolás del Puerto, where he was baptized.
Home of San Diego, San Nicolás del Puerto.
From his earliest youth he consecrated himself to the Lord as a hermit in the chapel of San Nicolás de Bari, in his hometown, and later in the hermitage of Albaida under the spiritual direction of a hermit priest.
He was quite a traveler for his time; he lived in the Canary Islands, Rome, Castilla and Andalusia and visited numerous places in Córdoba, Seville and Cádiz. During his pilgrimage to Rome he passed through numerous places in Spain, France and Italy. He resided in the convents of La Arruzafa (Córdoba), Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Santa María de Araceli (Rome) and Santa María de Jesús (Alcalá de Henares), where he died in 1463.
Very little is known of his early years. The most reliable of his biographies, that of Francisco Peña, a lawyer and promoter in Rome of the cause of his canonization, and who must have had the best data on the life of San Diego, acknowledges this. Cristóbal Moreno del Camino, translator in the 16th century into Spanish of Peña's Latin work, also attests to this insufficiency of data on his childhood and early years. And even the History of the glorious Saint Diego de San Nicolás, written by the one who was guardian of the convent of Santa María de Jesús, in Alcalá de Henares, where the saint lived and died, is referred to at this time. to the previous biographies of Peña and Moreno. The History of Rojo, the guardian of Complutense, published in 1663, sixty years after Moreno's death and a century away from Peña's Latin work, could not be expanded with new data, as would seem logical because he had lived in the same convent., what the bull and previous biographers communicate to us. Alonso Morgado does not enrich our knowledge of Diego's childhood with contributions that fill the void of his early years.
Religious profession
After passing through Albaida and confirming her desire to consecrate herself to religious life, she moved to the convent of San Francisco de la Arruzafa, in Córdoba. There Diego entered as a lay brother in the Order of the Minor Friars of the Observance (Franciscans of the Observance). In fact, San Diego is the patron saint of lay Franciscan brothers, that is, they are not priests.
During her stay in this convent she visited numerous towns in Córdoba, Seville and Cádiz, giving rise to a devotion that still survives in the traditions of not a few of those towns.
La Arruzafa is one of the convents in Spain restored to primitive and rigorous Franciscan observance, around 1409, by Fray Pedro Santoyo. The Parador de la Arruzafa is now located in the place it occupied.
Mission in the Canary Islands
In 1441, he was sent as a missionary to the Canary Islands, to the convent of Arrecife (island of Lanzarote), where he worked as a porter. In his role as convent porter, he had the opportunity to exercise charity with great generosity, sometimes considered excessive by his community brothers. He then lived in the Franciscan convent of Fuerteventura until he returned to the peninsula in 1449. For four years he held the position of guardian of the convent. The Canary Islands, which in 1402 had been claimed for colonization by Jean de Béthencourt, had initially been evangelized by the Franciscans. The task was soon continued by the Observant Franciscans (a reform movement within the Order of the Minor Brothers, founding the convent of Fuerteventura in 1422. On the death of the first guardian and Vicar of the Canary Islands Mission, all eyes fell on Fray Diego, who was elected successor and had to move there. The leaders of the Order had broken the legal norm of not conferring any government position on a lay brother. He embarked for Gran Canaria, but a The storm forced him to return to Fuerteventura, where, shortly after, he received the order to return to the Iberian Peninsula, going to Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
Pilgrimage to Rome
On the occasion of the celebration in Rome of the Jubilee of 1450, decreed by Pope Nicholas V and the canonization of Bernardino de Siena, thousands of Friars Minor made a pilgrimage to that city, among them Fray Diego. A large number of religious who came to Rome fell ill, victims of an epidemic that struck the city, and the large convent of Araceli was converted into an infirmary. Fray Diego took over the management of the makeshift hospital, where he stayed for three months treating the sick.
Return to Spain
On his return to Spain, he passed through several convents, including Nuestra Señora de la Salceda, in Tendilla (Guadalajara). In 1456 he moved to the Convent of Santa María de Jesús (Alcalá de Henares), which had just been built by Alfonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo. This was the oldest of the convents founded in this city, located outside its walls, next to the current University. In said convent he will spend the rest of his life, seven years, working as a gardener and as a doorman. He would have been in his sixties when he died. His remains have been found since then in the Cathedral of Alcalá de Henares. They are currently kept in a 17th century silver urn, and his incorrupt body is exposed every year on November 13.
Having been popular in life among the humblest, he gathered the most powerful to his grave after his death. Enrique IV of Castile went to her tomb to ask for the healing of Juana la Beltraneja. Cardinals of Toledo, princes of Spain, and later King Felipe II himself, came to her tomb, carried away by a feeling of confidence in her miraculous sanctity.
Philip II had the mummy taken to the royal chambers in order to invoke divine mediation in the healing of his son Prince Carlos, when in 1562, while studying in Alcalá de Henares, he had a serious fall down the stairs in the Palace Archiepiscopal, giving himself a serious blow to the head. This fact would later be considered a miracle and would be popularized by Lope de Vega.
Canonization
He was the only saint canonized throughout the entire XVI century, by Pope Sixtus V, on 10 July 1588, culminating the process introduced by Pius IV at the request of King Philip II of Spain, becoming the first Spanish saint of the Modern Age. Among the six miracles approved by the Sacred Congregation of Rites for his canonization, the most famous is precisely the healing of Prince Charles.
Another miracle that is attributed to him is that of having saved, on a trip he made to Seville during his stay at Arruzafa, a child who had imprudently entered and slept in an oven, which was turned on in the meantime. After Diego's mediation, the little one appeared out of the oven without the slightest burn. This and other miracles the humble friar used to attribute to the intervention of the Virgin Mary.
Devotion
He was a very popular saint. Many convents, churches and chapels, and even the city of San Diego in California, are dedicated to his name. Among the friars, he is the patron of lay Franciscans.
In Spain, he is patron saint of his hometown, San Nicolás del Puerto (Seville), of the Almeria town of Cuevas del Almanzora, of Cogolludo in Alcarreña and of Ayamonte in Huelva. In Baena (Córdoba), every Wednesday of Holy Week, he leads a procession opening the procession parade of the Brotherhood of Nuestro Padre Jesús del Huerto , of which he is co-owner. He is also patron saint of Tuéjar, a Spanish municipality belonging to the province and diocese of Valencia, in the Valencian Community, and to the Los Serranos region. He is also patron saint of the town of Almendricos, in the municipality of Lorca, in the province of Murcia.
In the Canary Islands, students celebrate it in an unofficial but widespread party, the San Diego escape. This consisted of honoring San Diego in his hermitage located outside the city of San Cristóbal de La Laguna in Tenerife. The students had to count the buttons on the tunic of the statue of the founder of the convent (current San Diego hermitage), it was said that if they got that number right, they would pass their exams. At present it is still celebrated, although the students no longer go to their hermitage, but instead taking the day as a pretext for not attending classes. The festival of San Diego de Alcalá is also celebrated in the Canary Islands, in Tuineje, as well as in Gran Tarajal (Fuerteventura).
In America it is a party in several places in Mexico, in the State of Campeche in the community of Nunkiní, municipality of Calkini. In the state of Veracruz in the town of Los Otates, the bread fair is held annually, in honor of its patron saint. Also in the municipality of Santiago Astata, Oaxaca is the San Diego Bay in honor of him alone, the festival is celebrated annually on December 20. In the same way, in the community of San Diego Tetitlán in Huatusco, on November 13, a series of events are held in commemoration of him. Also in the northern state of Durango, in the municipalities of Canatlán and Peñón Blanco of which he is the patron saint and where the mission of San Diego de Alcalá was founded during the Spanish colonization explorations. The local parish bears the name of this saint to this day. In the United States of America he gives his name to the city of San Diego (California), San Diego County (California) and Mission San Diego.
San Diego in art
Great artists took care of him. Lope de Vega dedicated the sonnet La verde iedra al tronco asida, and the comedy San Diego de Alcalá to her.
He is depicted as young and beardless, despite reaching sixty years of age, frequently with:
- A few keys, for having been porter and cook of the convent,
- Collecting with both hands his scapular as an apron full of flowers.
This last episode is one of the most popular and represented in its iconography. It refers to a legend according to which Diego was so generous with those who begged at the door of the convent, that his superiors found it annoying and excessive. On a certain occasion when they saw how Diego was wearing something in his habit, and suspicious because he had already given his daily alms, they were about to rebuke him when miraculously the rolls that the saint brought to the poor turned into roses.
He was portrayed by Zurbarán, Ribera, Murillo, Gregorio Fernández, Alonso Cano and Pedro de Mena, depicting scenes from his life relating to the performance of works of charity or some of the miracles attributed to them. The Baroque painter Annibale Carracci dedicated a complete cycle of frescoes on the life of San Diego in the church of Santiago de los Españoles in Rome, currently distributed in various museums and institutions.
The controversy of place names
Fray Diego de San Nicolás always carried the name of the town where he was born in the documents of his time. Both the primitive histories of the saint and the bull of canonization issued by Sixto V, do not know another place of reference than San Nicolás del Puerto. However, he is known in the saints as San Diego de Alcalá, because of the place where he spent his last years and where his remains rest. This name was also popularized by Lope de Vega when he used it as the title of one of his comedies, whose plot is the life of the saint.
Alonso Morgado, in his Santoral Hispalense, considers that San Diego should be designated by the name of his native town, instead of the place name of Alcalá. Something that also occurs with San Antonio de Padua, who was born in Lisbon (Portugal) and died in Padua (Italy), where his remains rest; or with San Isidoro de Sevilla, who was born in Cartagena.