Servant of God John of Jesus Hernández y Delgado

John of Jesus Hernández y Delgado (Spanish: fray Juan de Jesús; December 1615 – 6 February 1687) was a Spanish Friar Minor and mystic. The cause for his canonization has been submitted to the Holy See. He was born presumably during December 1615 to Miguel Hernández and María Delgado y Díaz. He was named for his maternal grandfather, Juan Díaz, a descendant of the last Guanche Mencey (King) of Daute, one of the kingdoms on Tenerife before its conquest by Spain. The day of his birth is not known but he was baptized on 20 December of that year in the Parish Church of St. Mark. At the age of ten he was apprenticed to a cooper in Garachico, then a thriving center for the export of the local wine. The individual shop owner was a violent man, who would vent his anger upon his apprentence, to the point of throwing him into a bonfire, burned as a traditional part of the festival of Saint John the Baptist, which caused the boy the loss of his left eye. He accepted this treatment with deep resignation as a trial of his faith and kept at his job, combining prayer and penance to deal with it. Hernández learned to read and in 1641 moved to the city of Puerto de la Cruz for better work. While he was making a better living, he felt drawn to follow a more religious way of life, a desire he put off, however, to support his mother. During that period, though, he first begin experiencing ecstasies. One story recounts how he went into a state of ecstasy when he was in front of the Church of Our Lady of the Rock of France (Spanish: Nuestra Señora de la Peña de Francia) in the center of the town, rising up from the ground and flying down the street to the Plaza del Charco, reaching the coast in the neighborhood of Martiánez. Several residents were witnesses to the event. Hearing a Lenten sermon by a Franciscan friar led to Hernández' desire to join that Order. Upon the death of his mother in 1646, he applied for admission to the Order.