This saint was born at Montilia in Andalusia to 1549, performed his
studies in the schools of the Jesuits, and in 1569 made his religious
profession amongst the Franciscans in the place of his nativity. An
extraordinary humility and contempt of himself and of worldly vanity
and applause; self-denial, obedience, meekness, patience, and the
love of silence, recollection, and prayer mental and vocal, formed
his character. Whole nights he frequently passed without sleep on the
steps of the altar, before the Blessed Sacrament, in meditation and
devout prayer, with wonderful interior delight and devotion. Burning
with holy zeal and charity, and an ardent desire of the salvation of
souls, after he was promoted to the priesthood, he divided his time
between silent retirement and the ministry of preaching. His sermons,
though destitute of the ornaments of studied eloquence, powerfully
withdrew men from vice, and kindled in their breasts an ardent desire
of virtue. The saint was appointed master of novices, first in the
convent of Arizava, two miles from Cordova, afterward in that of
Monte. Then he was made guardian in the province of Granada. His
whole life, says Alvarez de Paz, may be called a holy uninterrupted
course of zealous action, yet was at the same time a continued
most fervent prayer, abounding with heavenly illuminations and
consolations. A perfect spirit of poverty emptied his heart of the
love of all created things, that Christ alone might occupy and fill
it; and he rejoiced in his nakedness and privation of earthly goods,
that he might barely use them to serve the necessities of nature,
without suffering them to enslave his heart, or to find any place
in his affections, which he reserved pure and entire for spiritual
goods. Interior humility and self-denial perfected the disengagement
of his heart, and the extraordinary austerities of his penitential
life subjected his senses, and rendered the liberty which his soul
enjoyed complete; by which he was prepared for the spirit of prayer
and the pure love of heavenly things. Earthly comforts used with
moderation, and as supports of our weakness, may be sanctified by a
good intention; but whilst they bolster up our weakness, they keep it
alive and strengthen it; and if they are sought after, or made use
of with eagerness and attachment, immoderately or frequently, they
strongly nourish self love and sensuality, and produce a distrust of
the solid food of devotion and divine love.
The mortified lives of all the saints who arrived at a familiarity
with God in holy prayer, are but a comment upon, or sensible examples
of, the indispensable gospel precept of dying to ourselves. By no
other steps could St. Francis Solano have arrived at the perfection
of spiritual life. A pestilence which raged at Granada afforded
him an opportunity of exerting his heroic virtue in attending the
infected; but a more noble theatre of action was opened to him by the
mission into America, upon which he was sent. Peru and Tucuman were
the countries in which he reaped the principal harvest; and the five
last years of his life he preached chiefly at Lima, and induced the
inhabitants of that great city, by sincere repentance, to appease the
divine anger, which they had provoked by their sins. The reputation
of his wonderful sanctity was enhanced by many miracles. Yet by
humility he looked upon himself as the least among men, and he never
appeared in public but when called abroad by zeal for the salvation
of souls. Before his death he was purified by a lingering illness,
and in his last moments repeated those words of the psalmist: _I have
rejoiced in those things which have been said to me: We will go into
the house of the Lord_. He departed this life on the 14th of June
in 1610, the sixty-second of his age, and fortieth of his religious
profession. F. Alvarez de Paz, an eye-witness, describes the stately
and religious pomp of his funeral, at which the viceroy of Peru and
the archbishop of Lima assisted, with extraordinary devotion. The
saint was beatified by Clement X. and canonized by Benedict XIII. in
1726, and his principal festival was appointed on the 24th of July.
See his life compiled by Didacus of Cordova; also by Alphonsus of
Mondietta. See likewise the History of the Provinces of Peru, and the
edifying account of our saint given by the pious and learned Jesuit
F. Alvarez de Paz, l. 5, c. 14, t. 2, Op. p. 1752 and 1753; and
Benedict XIV., De Canoniz. t. 1, Append. Also the Lives of Saints,
published in High Dutch, by F. Maximilian Rasler, S. J.; and F.
Charlevoix, Hist. de Paraguay, t. 1, l. 3, and 4.