Saintly Biography and the Cult of San Felipe De Jesús in Mexico City, 1597–1697

By the late seventeenth century, the cult of San Felipe de Jesús (ca. 1572–97), native of Mexico City and martyr in Japan, had taken a stable form in Mexico City, where he was born. Each year on February 5, the dignitaries of the viceregal capital gathered for a procession through the city center and a liturgical ceremony in the cathedral to praise the saint and his city, but for the rest of the year, residents largely ignored him. A multitude of social interests had led to this less-than-wholehearted embrace, among them rivalry between religious orders, civic self-promotion, and religious beliefs.

In the ways that local stakeholders molded the devotion to fit their social concerns, the cult of San Felipe conformed to the typical pattern derived from the historiography of Latin American saints.¹ However, the devotion to San Felipe was not simply a vehicle for conveying social meaning.² Clerics and others researched the saint in archival sources and in the accounts of persons who had witnessed his martyrdom to reconstruct the story of his life and death. This body of saintly biography shaped the ways in which the people of Mexico City understood his piety and virtues, evaluated his miraculous powers, and celebrated his cult.³ The saintly biography played an especially critical role in the earliest stages of the devotion to San Felipe in Mexico City. Although social changes shaped his cult and public persona over time, the changes were always in keeping with the elements established early on in the saintly biography.

The unusual circumstances of San Felipe's life lend themselves very well to an examination of the influence of written biography on a developing cult. Although born in Mexico City, his most important religious exploits took place in Asia. After a brief stint as a merchant in Manila, Felipe took the cloth as a Franciscan friar in 1593. On his voyage home to Mexico in 1596, a typhoon stranded his boat on a Japanese coast, and a series of misunderstandings led to his arrest with a group of Catholic missionaries and Japanese Christian converts. On February 5, 1597, Fr. Felipe and twenty-six others died by crucifixion in Nagasaki. In 1627, Pope Urban VIII beatified the martyrs as a group, making San Felipe the first holy figure born in the Americas to be so honored. From this point colonial documents uniformly referred to him as San Felipe even though he was technically a beato (blessed one) prior to his canonization in 1862.⁴ Upon hearing the news of the Nagasaki martyrdom and the beatification, clerics in Mexico City scoured the written sources for clues to the saint's earlier life there, for evidence of his religious devotion and attributes, and for stories related to his death by crucifixion. What they found instead was that San Felipe de Jesús did not come up to the standards of other Catholic martyrs—he demonstrated neither outstanding religious virtue nor an abundance of miraculous power.

Shipwreck and a Martry's Death

Felipe first came to the attention of a wide Mexican public in 1598, after news of his martyrdom became known there. However, people learned quickly that Felipe the martyr was not like the religious heroes exalted in sermons and pious literature. The most telling evidence suggested that the young friar tried to avoid crucifixion three times and played only a minor role in the larger martyrdom story. Because Felipe's biography suggested little of saintly merit, he began his afterlife in the public perception as a holy figure of a lesser order.

Felipe de las Casas began his sojourn in the Pacific as a merchant.⁵ Of his time in Manila as a businessman (ca. 1591–93), he wrote that he had freely sampled the delights available in a port city and that he had "got carried away by gratifying pleasures [and] living with some liberty."⁶ But in May 1593, the young man had a change of heart and joined the Discalced Franciscans at their Santa...