Blessed Sebastian de Aparicio

Sebastián de Aparicio y del Pardo (20 January 1502 – 25 February 1600) was a Spanish colonist in Mexico shortly after its conquest by Spain, who after a lifetime as a rancher and road builder entered the Order of Friars Minor as a lay brother. He spent the next 26 years of his long life as a beggar for the Order and died with a great reputation for holiness. He has been beatified by the Catholic Church. Aparicio was born in A Gudiña, Ourense, in the Galician region of Spain. He was the third child and only son of Juan de Aparicio and Teresa del Prado, who were poor, but pious peasants, and spent his childhood tending sheep and cattle and in service to those of means. He learned his prayers from his parents, but had no schooling, and was not able to read or write. Despite his illiteracy, he had absorbed how to lead a pious and holy life so that he could emulate models in hagiographic texts. According to his own account, his life was saved in a seemingly-miraculous way during an outbreak of the bubonic plague in his town in 1514. Forced to isolate him from the community in quarantine, his parents built a hidden shelter for him in the woods, where they left him. While lying there helpless, due to his illness, a she-wolf found the hiding spot and, poking her head into his hiding spot, sniffed and then bit and licked an infected site on his body, before running off. He began to heal from that moment. When Aparicio was older, he determined to seek work outside his region in order to help support his family and to provide dowries for his sisters. He traveled east to Salamanca and then as far south as Sanlúcar de Barrameda. He finally decided to improve his fortune by traveling to the Americas. Aparicio sailed from Spain in 1533, landing in Veracruz later that year.