St. Michael de Sanctis

Michael de Sanctis — Miguel de los Santos — was a Spanish mystic of the Trinitarian order who died at Valladolid in 1625 at the age of thirty-three, having lived as a religious for barely a decade and a half, and who was canonized in 1862 on the strength of a cause that had been carefully built across two centuries. He was born at Vic in Catalonia in 1591, showed an early and intense piety that his family found unusual enough to document, and entered the Trinitarians at twelve. When the reformed branch of the order — the Discalced Trinitarians, who had reverted to the strict original rule — established itself in Spain, he transferred to them and professed vows under the austere observance.

The mystical life that characterized his years as a Trinitarian belongs to the specifically eucharistic tradition that runs through a number of the Spanish mystics of the period. His contemporaries in the community documented experiences of ecstasy during the Mass and after communion that were prolonged and striking. The record of these testimonies deserves respect and caution in equal measure: the witnesses were numerous, the incidents were observed across years rather than being isolated events, and the quality of his regular life — his prayer, his obedience, his care for the sick — gave the community no reason to doubt the seriousness of what they were observing.

The Trinitarian context is the most theologically interesting element. The order dedicated to the redemption of captives generated in Michael de Sanctis a mystic who seems to have experienced the eucharist as itself a form of captivity freely accepted: the prisoner of the tabernacle, held in love. This reading is offered without insisting on it as more than a suggestive possibility.