Saint Benedict the Moor

He was born at San Fratello, a village of the Diocese of Messina in Sicily, in 1524 according to Vatican News and the Order of Friars Minor, or 1526 according to the Catholic Encyclopedia and Franciscan Media. ¹²³⁴

His parents were enslaved. The encyclopedia calls them "slaves from Ethiopia who were, nevertheless, pious Christians." ³ The Friars Minor name them as Giuseppe Cristoforo and Diana Larcari, descendants of slaves deported from Ethiopia, and say the family took the surname Manassari from the landowner who held them. ⁴ Franciscan Media says only that they were brought from Africa to Messina. ²

How Benedict came to be free is told three ways. The encyclopedia says the master freed him, the first-born child, on account of his parents' faithfulness. ³ The Friars Minor say the couple had decided to have no children rather than bring more slaves into the world, and that the master promised them their firstborn would be free. ⁴ Franciscan Media says he was freed at 18. ² The Minister General, Br. Massimo Fusarelli, puts it as "born free by permission of a slave master." ⁵

The Friars Minor say he tended his master's flock; Franciscan Media says that once free he worked a farm for wages and saved enough to buy a pair of oxen, of which he was very proud. ²⁴ He was, the Friars Minor record, "often mocked for the brown color of the skin and the servile extraction of his family." ⁴

At 21, according to the Friars Minor, he met Girolamo Lanza, a nobleman who had left his family and his wealth to live as a hermit at Santa Domenica, near San Fratello. Lanza said to him: "Blessed, what are you doing? Sell the oxen and come." Benedict told his parents, sold the oxen, gave the money to the poor and went. ⁴

The hermits followed the Rule of Saint Francis, with a fourth vow, the Friars Minor say, binding them to fast three times a week. ²⁴ Franciscan Media places the group around Palermo and says Benedict was eventually recognized as its leader. Vatican News names it as the hermit community on Monte Pellegrino. ¹²

The sources disagree about how the community ended. The Catholic Encyclopedia says Pope Pius IV dissolved the association; Franciscan Media says Pius IV ordered the hermits to join the First Order. ²³ The Friars Minor tell it as Benedict's own decision: the hermitage was unstable, and after 17 years of hermit life, careful discernment and long prayer to the Virgin Mary, he asked to be received at the friary of Santa Maria di Gesù in Palermo. ⁴ The encyclopedia names the branch he entered as the Reformed Recollects of the Franciscan Order. ³

He entered as a lay brother, and the friars gave him the humblest work. ³⁴ Vatican News says he started as a cook, and the Friars Minor say he kept the kitchen for a long time. ¹⁴ He was illiterate. ⁴⁵ Br. Massimo writes that "according to the canon law and culture of the time," the son of slaves could not have belonged to a religious order, and that the friars saw past it. ⁵

They made him their superior, and here the sources differ on the order and the length of his offices. The Catholic Encyclopedia says he was made superior of Santa Maria di Gesù three years after entering, "although he was only a lay brother," and that he reformed the house and governed it until his death. ³ The Friars Minor date his appointment as guardian to 1578 and say he was later made master of novices, thanks to "that instinctive and almost infused knowledge of Scripture and theological issues." ⁴ Franciscan Media reverses the order, novice master first and then guardian, says he was forced to accept his election, and says that when his term ended he happily went back to the kitchen. ² Vatican News says only that he advanced from cook to novice master. ¹

Franciscan Media tells two small stories of how he used that authority. He once corrected a novice and gave him a penance, then learned that the novice was not the guilty party, and knelt before him at once to ask his pardon. ² And he never spoke of the few things he used as "mine," only as "ours." ² Priests and friars came to him for guidance, and Br. Massimo writes that the viceroy himself treated him as a trusted advisor. ⁴⁵

His fame as a saint and a worker of miracles spread through the whole island, and the Friars Minor say the canonization processes record numerous healings. ⁴ Br. Massimo writes that while he was cook his fame grew "among the people and the Black slaves," and that he was soon considered a living saint. ⁵

The Minister General's letter tells one story at length. A heavy snowfall had kept the friars from going out to beg, and there was no food in the house. Benedict had tubs filled with water and prayed, trusting in "Divine Providence," and the next morning, the letter says, "the tanks were full of darting fish!" ⁵ The encyclopedia and Franciscan Media do not tell it. ²³

He fell ill in February 1589 and died on April 4 ³⁴, Easter Tuesday, at seven in the evening. ⁴ Even before any word came from Rome, Br. Massimo writes, the faithful of Palermo moved his body from the friary cemetery into the church, as is done for canonized saints. ⁵ Franciscan Media says King Philip III of Spain paid for a special tomb. ²

Pope Benedict XIV recognized his cult on May 15, 1743, and Pope Pius VII canonized him on May 24, 1807. ⁴ The encyclopedia gives the same two years, calling the first his beatification. ³ In 1712, according to the Friars Minor, the Senate of Palermo had already chosen him as co-patron of the city. ⁴

The Minister General's letter speaks of his incorrupt body, and records that it was severely damaged by the wildfires of July 29, 2023. ⁵

Devotion to him traveled far from Sicily. The Friars Minor say it spread through Italy, Spain, the rest of Europe and the Americas, and recently to Africa, that he is known as "Benedetto da Palermo" or "São Benedito Preto," and that a church was built in his honor in the center of Manhattan. ⁴ Br. Massimo has seen the devotion above all in Brazil and other Latin American countries, and still feels that Benedict "is not sufficiently well known." ⁵

Franciscan Media lists Saint Benedict the Moor as patron of African Americans, and says that since his canonization he has been honored as a patron saint by African Americans. ² He is also co-patron of Palermo, chosen by the Senate of that city in 1712, according to the Friars Minor. ⁴

The Minister General gives his own reason for looking to Benedict first of all as he was. "It is as a Black man that Benedict firstly speaks to us of the Gospel," he writes, and in himself Benedict is a reminder that "there is neither slave nor free" in Christ. ⁵

Vatican News keeps him on April 4, the day of his death, and Franciscan Media says his liturgical feast is celebrated on April 4, though it runs his story on April 3. ¹² The Catholic Encyclopedia, writing in 1907, gave his feast as April 3. ³

Much of Benedict's religious life was spent in a kitchen. Vatican News and the Friars Minor both begin his years as a friar at the stove, and Franciscan Media ends his term as guardian there, saying he went back to the kitchen happily once it was over. ¹²⁴ Franciscan Media draws a lesson for its own order from that: leadership among Franciscans is limited in time, and the Church needs people who will put their best energies into leading and then go gracefully on to other work. ²

His origins were held against him. Br. Massimo writes that he was "vilified and mistreated by his peers because of the colour of his skin and his goodness, especially towards the poor," and that he came to see that socially disadvantaged condition as the place where he could follow Christ. ⁵ The letter also acknowledges "with sorrow" that for many centuries the conscience of Christians about slavery was ambivalent, and says that enslaved Africans made up between 1.5 and 4 percent of the population of Sicily. ⁵

The story of the wrongly punished novice is a small one, and Franciscan Media tells it without comment: the superior found he had been wrong, and knelt. ² It is told of a man who, by the same account, had to be made to accept the office. ²

Br. Massimo closes his letter by asking that the memory of Benedict open the eyes of the friars to "the new forms of harsh slavery common throughout the world," and that it help them come out of "our houses, which are often too far removed from the little ones." ⁵ He wrote it for the World Day of the Poor, a year after the fire. ⁵