Luis Beltrán (1526–1581)

Biography

He became a Dominican friar even though he was in very poor health. His gifts must have been so splendid that at the age of twenty-three he was already a novice master. He then went with a group of 30 friars to America and there - in Colombia, Panama and the Antilles - he dedicated himself to the indigenous people with such zeal that he achieved many conversions. It is said that he worked numerous miracles - the Indians understood him even if he did not speak their language - and he made many enemies, because he faced the rapacity of the encomenderos. He returned to Valencia after several years, and was prior of a monastery where Saint Teresa and Saint John of Ribera consulted him. His motto was “Belittle me and belittle no one else.” He was named patron saint of Colombia and the words of Pope John Paul II pronounced in Zaragoza in 1984 can be applied to him. "As pastor of the universal Church, I wish to deeply thank the uninterrupted generosity with which, for almost five centuries, so many families have given sons and daughters, so that they could bring the light of Christ to the peoples of the New World. Thank you, then, in the name of the Church! Thank you to those Spanish families who in the first forty years of discovering the New World sent there nearly 3,000 religious and about 400 clerics! Thank you because, in these five centuries, more than 200,000 Spanish missionaries have gone to serve the Church in Latin America!