St. Turibius de Mogrovejo

Turibius de Mogrovejo was one of the most consequential figures in the early history of the Church in South America — the man who did for the Peruvian church what Charles Borromeo had done for Milan: imposed order, discipline, and genuine pastoral care on a colonial ecclesiastical structure that had drifted badly from both.

He was born at Mayorga in León, Spain, around 1538, studied canon law at Salamanca, and was serving as Grand Inquisitor at Granada when Philip II appointed him Archbishop of Lima in 1580. The appointment was irregular — Turibius was a layman, and the archdiocese was enormous — but he accepted it, received orders in quick succession, and sailed for Peru. He arrived in 1581 and did not leave his diocese until his death in 1606, twenty-five years of continuous pastoral labor over a territory of extraordinary size and difficulty.

The record is substantial. Turibius made three complete pastoral visitations of his archdiocese, travelling by foot and mule through the Andes. He learned Quechua and several other indigenous languages, insisted that the sacraments be administered in the people's own tongues, and published catechisms in both Quechua and Aymara — a practical pastoral decision that was also a doctrinal one, since it treated the indigenous people as genuine members of the Church rather than its subjects. He confirmed or baptized an estimated half a million people, among them the young Rose of Lima and the young Martin de Porres, both of whom he would eventually confirm in the same era.

He convened three provincial councils at Lima that organized the governance of the South American church on the model of the Tridentine reforms and whose decrees remained operative for generations. He died at Saña in 1606 while on a visitation, insisting on completing his circuit despite serious illness. He was canonized in 1726.