Diego Luis de San Vitores

Life and Ministry

Diego Luis de San Vitores was born at Burgos in Old Castile in AD 1627 to an aristocratic family, entered the Society of Jesus at the age of fourteen, and was ordained at Alcalá in AD 1651. After a decade as a brilliant young professor of philosophy and theology in Spain, he obtained permission in AD 1660 to be sent to the Pacific missions and spent the next eight years at Manila and on the long voyages between New Spain and the Philippines. In AD 1668 he led the first permanent Christian mission to the Mariana Islands — the chain northeast of the Philippines whose principal island the Spanish renamed Guam — establishing a residence at Hagåtña and beginning the catechization of the Chamorro people, whose language he learned, whose customs he studied, and for whose children he founded the first schools in Micronesia.

Circumstances of Death

Tensions on Guam arose from several sources at once — Chamorro political resistance to Spanish colonial overtures, suspicion that baptism caused illness among infants, and the personal hostility of a Chamorro headman named Mata'pang whose daughter San Vitores had baptized at the request of the child's Christian mother but against the father's wishes. On 2 April AD 1672, San Vitores walked into the village of Tumon with the Filipino lay catechist Pedro Calungsod to perform the baptism. Mata'pang, refusing to be reconciled, attacked them with a companion. Calungsod was killed first with a spear; San Vitores was struck down with a cutlass and his body thrown into the lagoon. (Modern historians are right to note that the Chamorro-Spanish wars of the next twenty-five years had complex political and demographic causes; San Vitores himself, however, was unarmed and acting as a parish priest at the moment of his death.)

Legacy

San Vitores is the founder-saint of the Catholic Church in Micronesia and the first European to set down the Chamorro language in writing. Beatified by John Paul II in AD 1985, he gave the Marianas their Spanish name in honor of the Queen Mariana of Austria and gave the Chamorros their first Christian catechism. His witness is the witness of the missionary who is killed at a baptism: Christ is named over a child in the lagoon, and the priest who names him is named with him in the same water. Pedro Calungsod, the Filipino catechist killed at his side, was canonized in AD 2012 — the first lay missionary in the Pacific to be raised to the altar.