Eduardo González
In March 1622, the Pope made the unusual decision to canonize four people from the same country at once. Three of them already enjoyed by then an undoubted international prestige: no less than the two Jesuit saints, Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, and the celebrated Carmelite Teresa of Jesus. The fourth canonized was a modest medieval farmer of local scope who suddenly became the ideal saint for a Monarchy that had decided to make the town of Madrid one of its main political references: Isidro Labrador, whose feast day is celebrated today.
Isidro was born in Madrid at the end of the 11th century and died in 1172. In 1212, after the discovery of his incorrupt body in the cemetery of the Church of San Andrés and after King Alfonso VIII of Castile passed through Madrid to venerate his remains after the victory at Las Navas de Tolosa, the cult to his person, whom the people already called San Isidro, began. The religious fervor for his life and miracles (including posthumous miracles) increased over the years, but, for the time being, it did not go beyond the merely popular and local sphere, even when the authorities decided to transfer his incorrupt body to the chapel of the Body of San Isidro in the first decades of the 16th century.
The process for the true papal canonization of Isidro (until then, his canonization had been “popular”) began officially in 1562, but accelerated especially from 1593, when, according to Professor Esteban Angel Cotillo Torrejon, King Felipe II learned of Isidro’s mediation in his healing as a child and decided, in gratitude, to write to Pope Clement VIII requesting the canonization of his protector, for which he had the help of Fray Domingo de Mendoza, a Dominican from the Madrid convent of Atocha who played a prominent role in the causes of several Spanish candidates for sainthood.
The canonization of Isidro faced two important problems: on the one hand, after the Council of Trent, the Vatican decided to harden the canonization processes, which remained in the exclusive hands of the Pope, in order to avoid anomalous situations and to avoid the criticisms of the Lutherans. On the other hand, Isidro was not only a layman, but his history was too old and diffuse and was poorly documented (based on oral tradition), which made it very difficult to find actions and miracles that would justify canonization. His situation was, therefore, very different from that of the other three Spanish saints of 1622: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and Teresa of Jesus, who had died a few years earlier and were founders of religious orders of international scope.
For all these reasons, both Felipe II (promoter of the cause) and his son Felipe III (who succeeded him at his death in 1598) decided to move heaven and earth in the Vatican to achieve their purpose of having a saint exclusively linked to the Hispanic Monarchy and, more specifically, to its capital, Madrid, as revealed by the studies of Professor María José del Río.
A saint for the Villa and Court
Between 1593 and 1622 an enormous amount of Spanish diplomatic correspondence dedicated exclusively to the cause of San Isidro took place, consisting, above all, of letters of postulation sent by the Kings of Spain to the Roman Curia. The Holy See admitted his case for processing in 1596, three years after the collection of testimonies about his fame of sanctity began in Madrid and the first postulatory letters were sent. Between 1593 and 1598, three informative processes were carried out in Madrid and some towns in the region, but the cause was paralyzed in the final years of the pontificate of Clement VIII (who died in 1605) and was only resumed by Paul V, who received not only numerous postulatory letters from the main civil and ecclesiastical institutions of Madrid and Castile, but also from the very insistent Felipe III.
The letters had as correspondents, mainly, the Kings of Spain and their ambassadors to the Holy See, although some from the Cortes of Castile, the Cabildo of the clergy and the City Council of Madrid are also included. In 1593, Felipe II wrote to his ambassador in Rome, the Duke of Sessa, to transfer him a missive from the City Council of Madrid in which Isidro was defined as “a holy man”. In another later letter to Sessa, the Prudent King asked the Pope “not to defer this any longer” and the desire of “these Kingdoms and myself, because of the devotion I have for him,” that the canonization be accelerated, was conveyed to him.
Felipe III maintained the same tone and again asked the Duke of Sessa to speak with the Pope so that “he proceeds to his canonization”. In one of his replies (October 1599), the ambassador gave an account of his ambassador’s difficulties in dealing with the Pontiff because there had been some “dissensions” between “the King and His Holiness,” possibly because of the Pope’s decision to recognize King Henry IV of France, despite his Protestant beginnings.
In one of the ambassador’s answers to the Pope, in which he asked him if the King wanted to “canonize all the saints of Spain”, one of the keys of the interest of the Kings is appreciated: “For being so holy (Isidro) and being in the court of Spain, it had to be given place”. In other words, Felipe III was especially interested in the canonization of Isidro because he was highly venerated precisely in the city where his Court was located, Madrid.
A good example of this is that Isidro’s own cause suffered an important decline precisely in 1601, when the Court moved to Valladolid (where it remained until 1606). However, after the return of the Court to Madrid, the cause accelerated again. In 1606, stimulated by the election of a new Pope (Paul V) much more favorable to Spanish interests, Felipe III wrote to his ambassador, Duke of Escalona, and to the Pontiff himself to request that “the canonization of Blessed Isidro be completed”. In 1610, a new letter from the King to his ambassador, in this case the Count of Castro, made very clear the political and at the same time religious intentions of this process: Isidro should be canonized “for the devotion that I have to this glorious saint” and for “being a native of Madrid, where I was born, and because, ordinarily, my Court resides in that Villa”. Therefore, Isidro was destined not only to be the saint of the Villa de Madrid, but of the Court.
In the last decade of his reign, Felipe III sent dozens of letters to Rome regarding the canonization of Isidro, for which he requested the support of the Spanish cardinals Antonio Zapata and Gaspar de Borja, the latter ambassador to the Holy See between 1616 and 1619 (according to the aforementioned María José del Río, whom we are essentially following), and sent numerous petitions to the Pontiff through the various ambassadors who succeeded each other in Rome until 1619, when the Duke of Alburquerque was appointed.
Beatification and canonization
Thanks to the new impulse, and to the joy of Paul V himself, in 1619 the merely bureaucratic part had concluded and “what remains now is merely of grace”, as the Pope wrote to his ambassador in Madrid. Papal grace was achieved in 1619 not with the canonization, but through a brief of beatification in which Madrid was not only authorized to render Isidro the liturgical honors proper to a patron saint, but also to allow his cult in Spain and its overseas possessions. Despite such generosity, improper for a beatification, the desire of the Kings was canonization, and the diplomatic correspondence of the time clearly reveals their disappointment.
To further intensify the problem, in the autumn of 1619 the healing of Felipe III of a serious illness he had contracted during a trip to Portugal was attributed to the intercession of Blessed Isidro. In a moment of desperation, Isidro’s incorrupt body was brought to the Royal Palace so that the King could see it, touch it and pray directly for its cure.
This miraculous healing added to the arguments put forward by the Monarch in the half-dozen letters he sent to Rome in 1620, in one of which he urged the ambassador, Duke of Alburquerque, to convince “His Holiness to finish perfecting this work, and put the blessed man in the place he deserves”. In October 1620, Alburquerque sent an urgent dispatch to communicate that the Pope had made the decision to canonize Isidro. The death of the Pope in 1621 and the election of Gregory XV (to whom the King wrote on several occasions through his ambassadors) did not prevent the Vatican from maintaining its commitment, but it did introduce, as a great novelty, the demand that on the same day four other persons be canonized, including the three Spaniards mentioned above.
Finally, Isidro Labrador was proclaimed a saint on March 12, 1622 by Gregory XV, although the bull of his canonization was not published until 1724, under the Pontificate of Benedict XIII. The patron saint of the Villa had also just become the saint of the Court, a few years after Teresa of Jesus, also canonized that day, was proclaimed co-patron saint of Spain together with the apostle St. James.
Since then, San Isidro has been venerated on May 15, the same day on which, according to tradition, his incorrupt body was transferred to the Church of San Andrés. Currently, his patronage has spread to many other towns, usually rural, both in Spain and Latin America, such as Triquivijate (Fuerteventura), La Llosa (Castellón), Puntalón de Motril (Granada), Rota (Cádiz), Yecla (Murcia), Cuncumén (Chile), San Isidro de Carampa (Peru), San Isidro de Lules (Argentina), Sibarco (Colombia) or San Juan del Río and Xoxo (Mexico), among others. San Isidro is also the patron saint of farmers, agronomists and agricultural engineers.
