SOLANO, FRANCIS, ST.

Franciscan missionary; b. Montilla, Spain, March 1549; d. Lima, Peru, July 14, 1610. Solano was born of a moderately wealthy family in Andalusia. His secondary studies were made in the local Jesuit college. As a youth, he must have met frequently with Garcilaso Inca, the Peruvian writer, who went to Montilla to live in 1561. Solano entered the Franciscan Order in the local friary and was professed in 1570. He worked 20 years in Spain and 20 years in the Americas. In Spain, he was novice master, teacher, and superior. He was also a preacher with a boundless compassion for the ailing in society, as evidenced by his labors among the plague-stricken in Montoro. In 1589 his superiors sent him to America with a band of missionaries intended for Tucumán in Argentina. After landing in Lima, he journeyed overland to Santiago del Estero on foot, arriving in 1590. He had hardly passed a year among the natives of Socotonio and La Magdalena, when he was appointed custos of Tucumán and Paraguay. Upon the completion of the term, he was recalled to Peru (1598), where he spent the remaining years of his life as superior in Lima and Trujillo.

His biographers often picture him as a hermit of the desert rather than as a Franciscan from Andalusia, whose primary aim was to model his life after St. Francis of Assisi. Those who knew him best called him Franciscus redivivus. A gifted man with a fine voice and training on the Spanish violin, he was fond of composing songs and dances in honor of the Christ Child and the Blessed Mother. On occasion, he would snap his fingers to imitate the castanets of his native province. Knowledgeable in medical lore, he insisted on isolation of the victims of the plague and on burning the garments worn by those who had recovered. His passion was to make Christ known and loved by all men, and to this end he never spared himself. When his novices asked how they could become saints, he told them by accepting the disappointments of everyday life, especially those that came from their friends. He was a man of prayer and a lifelong student, especially of the writings of St. Bonaventure, a select library of whose works he always carried with him. Unfortunately, his writings, carols, and songs were all sent to Rome for the process of his beatification and then lost. Clement X beatified him in 1675 and Benedict XIII canonized him in 1726. His body rests in the Franciscan church in Lima, but his portable altar is in Buenos Aires; his ritual, in Córdoba; his miraculous spring, in Salta; his chasuble, in Tucumán; one cell, in la Rioja, and another, together with his garments, in Santiago del Estero, thus justifying in a way his title as apostle of South America.

Bibliography: j. g. oro, San Francisco Solano: Un hombre para las Americas (Madrid 1988). m. f. windeatt, Saint Francis Solano: Wonder Worker of the New World and Apostle of Argentina and Peru (Rockford 1994).

[a. caggiano]