Saint Miguel Febres Cordero

Saint Miguel Febres Cordero, known in his homeland as Brother Miguel, was an Ecuadorian religious of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a teacher, catechist, and author of school textbooks. For nearly forty years he taught in the Brothers’ schools in Ecuador, above all in Quito. The Church commemorates him on February 9.

He was born on November 7, 1854, in Cuenca, into a well-to-do Catholic family that had served the country with distinction. At baptism he received the names Francisco Luis. He came into the world with deformed feet, and walking caused him pain all his life. According to tradition, as a five-year-old boy who had not yet walked, he saw the Mother of God by a rosebush in the garden and then took his first steps.

In 1863 the Brothers of the Christian Schools opened a school in Cuenca, and Francisco became one of its first pupils. There his vocation matured. His parents were against it; they would have preferred their son to become a priest. Only on March 24, 1868, the eve of the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, did his mother sign her consent for him to enter the novitiate. He received the habit and the name Miguel. His father respected the decision, but for five years he did not write his son a single word.

He began his work in the Brothers’ schools in Quito. He taught Spanish language and literature, and since good textbooks were lacking, as a very young teacher he began to write grammars and other schoolbooks himself. The government introduced them in all the schools of Ecuador. In time he also published poems and philological works and became a member of the Ecuadorian Academy of the Language.

Yet catechesis was closest to his heart. He wrote catechisms for children, and from 1880 until he left the country he prepared pupils for First Holy Communion. John Paul II called him an apostle of the school and recalled that what mattered most to him was teaching the poorest children.

In 1907 his superiors called him to Europe. The Brothers who had left France for Spain and Latin America after the laws aimed at religious congregations needed textbooks for learning Spanish. After a few months in Paris he worked at the generalate in Lembecq-lez-Hal in Belgium, and when the climate there harmed his health he was transferred to Premià de Mar, near Barcelona. In July 1909, during anticlerical riots, the Brothers and their young charges took refuge in Barcelona, and Brother Miguel carried the Blessed Sacrament away from the chapel. At the end of January 1910 he fell ill with pneumonia. He died in Premià de Mar on February 9, 1910.

National mourning was declared in Ecuador. During the Spanish Civil War his mortal remains were taken to his homeland; since 1937 they have rested in Quito. Paul VI beatified him on October 30, 1977, together with the Belgian Brother Mutien-Marie Wiaux, and John Paul II canonized him on October 21, 1984, in the Vatican Basilica.