Memorial of the prodigious life and death of Father Monsignor Fray Simon de Rojas, confessor of the Queen, our lady.

Place: España
Year: Not specified
Event: Vida religiosa, Religious life

To her majesty, in the hands of Ana María Manrique De Lara, her lady.

Lady is the death of the just piedratoque* of her virtues that in her discover the carats of perfection that God had put in the soul, which she has in her hands and as they are fine stones, the wife told him that they were hands turned of gold, full of hyacinths, which St. Gregory of Nazianzus read in their place, the Tarphys stone, which the world does not esteem when they are [rough] because they do not know the carats and hidden beauty, until the asperon* of the artificer roughs and perfects it. Thus, although His Majesty knew Father Fray Simón de Rojas, his confessor, with the particular knowledge that he could infer from the treatment of his soul, and he would be ahead of ours in what goes from the Highness of the Majesty who has duplicated the assistance of the angels to the lowliness of our being, yet because his glorious transit did not see him, I am a witness of sight and instructed by his children and the orators that for 15 days (after the sovereign artificer, with the death-bolt, put aside the earthly, showing what the world had not known) was seen. In this memorial, I will make a boast of his heroic virtues that will encourage the memory, for he does not need the example His Majesty, may God keep.

Saturday, September 28, having spent the night before as the others, spending it in the choir, he was stricken with an illness at 9 a.m., which the imprudence of the century called apoplexy, without taking into consideration that a man so penitent that even from the 7 months of his birth, not wanting to take breast milk, showed what his abstinence should be. Neither of the night, nor of that morning, since for him the Sabbaths were eternally fasting, he could have the body occupied with earthly food, but if apoplexy is to exceed the object to the forces, just as the sweetness of honey [hiblea] decomposes the taste, the noise of the Nile’s deeps, deafens the eyes in the sun directly blind, so that divine ecstasy in which God wanted to snatch the new Elijah, redounding from the soul into the body, not only deprived him of strength, but of sense apparently, and if he lacked the haba it was that he knew God so well, even if he could speak of him in his death, he followed the sentence of St. Bernard: “It is better to speak to the bridegroom, than not of him.” That these amorous deliquiums* [loss or decay of the spirit, courage or strength] and weaknesses of the flesh are the effect of the spirit, is proven to us by a soul to whom the spouse had come down by ilapso* [a kind of contemplative ecstasy] of grace and who, unable to suffer the excess of sweetness, said: “Surround me with flowers and apples, I am sick with love”. From here were born the repeated voices of St. Francis Xavier, enough sir, enough sir with the affection of tearing the garments as giving rise to the heart to widen, that if as the proverb says: “The heart bursts me with pain in the flesh”, convertible term is to cause the taste the same affection nor do we say with St. Gregory the Great that the one who sees himself full, asks that the grace reverts in us. And this is how some of the Fathers understand the request of Christ in the garden: “Let this cup pass from me”. And because when God works supernaturally, he makes use of nature, for it is true that he does not destroy it but perfects it. The rapture in which he ordered the doctors four kinds of remedies that worked and it was strength [to return] with them, he did not do it and when he came to uncover his feet or chest, he threw his hands to cover himself. It was known at Court that he was close to death and his Majesty helped a desire continued in him for life. O if I should die as naked as Christ for he sent for his habits and as he had kept the advice of Christ, not to have two tunics, he was left naked and his sons lent him with what to die. He wished his death to be on the ground and with a miserable blanket on which he was accustomed to recline, he let himself fall on it and hurt himself, or fighting with the enemy which is probable because calling a child he had raised and saying Ave Maria which was the sign as he did not answer him, he lurked by the key and heard him say: “Go away from here, evil one” and if it was not the first thing to hurt himself when falling, out of envy to see him on the ground, he was hurt by the adversary. And it is here to ponder that the mothers sent universally in this article to bless them, as protesting that he who was to continue life in the eternal, could give it and their majesties are the most abounding witnesses, for being of so much horror in the Palace a thing of death, when the Patriarch asked in his name for the father’s clothes, he said that his majesty wanted them for the first son he would have, that to the faith of the Spanish Kings there is no superstition that is worth.

Or as the world looks with imprudence these actions, without judgment was the imitator of the Seraphic Francis, out of sense he in eminent degree chaste ,that to the remedies in which it was necessary to discover him the feet or the chest by the room of modesty, he threw the hands to cover himself when it was chaste the apoplexy, being the gluttony the greater incentive of dishonesty when it circumspect the lack of sense[? Luege must be inferred that he was raptured in God to the earthly and left him the use of the senses to attend z preserve the purity.

His sons, of the incidians of the great lords of the Court of the ministers of the religious and the people who universally came to venerate him, stripped him not only of the inner garments of the blankets and linens of the bed and the poor jewelry of the cell of the hair and nails, excremental] parts of the body, but having bled him, they soaked [soaked] the blood in linen, like another Praxedis and Potenciana, that of the martyrs, not out of hatred like the barbarian antiquity, but in sign of the covenant of friendship and worship acclaiming him all, Holy, Holy, Holy and here enters the reason to doubt this name that Silvestro, originator of the opinion in what Reliquis & veneraciones sanctorum, says followed by Father Azor of Don Sancho de Avila, bishop of Plasencia and all, that the name of saint does not give the pontiff, nor makes him so much the day of canonization or beatification, but declares that the works were holy and that he was so since his justification.

Just as he who is a nobleman by nature, the sentence does not make him a nobleman if he does not declare that he was one, and the confused people hid his nobility from him. It is proved in Christ who asked the Father to clarify it and he replied, “I have eternally clarified you from your beginning, without beginning, but if necessary it is necessary to do it again, which is to declare to you, to declare to the world that you are my son.” Our Father was holy and although there was a concept of his virtue, not as universal as his death discovered that if it is true (as it is) that my concept suffices for veneration, not for the public elevation of the altar, that belongs to the Apostolic See, which, assisted by the Holy Spirit, cannot err in its declaration. And just as the proverb says: “A wounded banner or a tolled bell” this great Court was finished at the Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity and the guards of His Majesty could not, that as the affection was pious it also moved the spirits accustomed to the harshness; because these changes are from the right hand of the Most High. And it is of no less consideration, that having the respect of the great lords obliged them to give them a great part of their cloths, there was so much that was distributed among the others, that if it were not a miracle, its multiplication would discredit their religious temperance. Like the miracle of the Cross of Christ, which, as the faith of the believers diminishes it, grows.

33 hours she was in the rapture, in which the clear vision of God continued, and on Sunday at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, day of the Archangel Michael, she gave her soul to the one who raised her, that if as some of the speakers in the fall of the Angels have thought, Michael said: Who is like God? And Gabriel: Who is like Mary? On the day of Michael go to enjoy the chairs that lost the one who replaced Gabriel, whose first word was: Ave Maria, which continued for the speech of 71 years with such reiteration that if St. Augustine made the account to those who came is given a sheet of writing every day, the father Fray Simon de Rojas can be given 3000 Ave Marias.

Dead (madam) grew the depths, already of tears, already of joy and competition because some were glad of his death to see him free of the contingency of losing the glory while living and others mourned that possesses the envy of such a profession or fear that removed from the middle the just man, they were closer to the punishment and this part of fears beginning of wisdom.

They attended the body of the Father his children, they put him stole of priest, hood and tassel of teacher, plasma and crown of flowers of virgin and the name of Ave Maria in the head and Christ in the other hand, that both had to be put in the heart, place in which he had them. And if trophies were to be placed on his tomb, they were to be the insignia of all the virtues and especially the myrrh* of St. Bernard. An inadvertence I will not fail to blame that they did not open her heart, because it seems impossible that if from the abundance of speech, the mouth would fail to have carved the name of Mary, as St. Gertrude or St. Clare of Montefalcon. To fulfill the devotion he put himself in a high tomb because the people saw him, who came universally to kiss his hands and feet, without exception Archbishops, Bishops, prelates of religions, clerics, friars, great lords of both sexes, nobles and commoners young and old, old and children and as the latter were his greatest gift and he served as their father and they were accustomed to go to his cell to help them and the capacity does not judge him dead. In faith of the custom, or perhaps by supernatural instinct, they go to his cell to call and ask and I would be of opinion that they were directed to the tomb, perhaps as another San Diego took out his hands to help them, because those who were taught in life to the heroic virtue of charity, foundation of the other virtues and in death as the others does not end, but is perfected, it is not possible, but it has to be exercised by the corpse.

On the first day, Monday, Don Diego de Guzman, patriarch of the Indies and almoner of His Majesty, performed the office of burial; no one else could do the honors of an almoner like him. More than the nobility of the Court and all the great ones, the servants and chapel of the Palace attended and so the guards were needed to let him be buried. His body was placed not in the common tomb of the Religious, but in a niche in the chapel of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, because that is where he lived and where he celebrated for so many years. He was covered with a brocade cloth three high when the soul was four high in the dowries of glory. And it is not too bold to say that it seems that in life he had dispositions ordered to the four dowries corresponding to the glorious bodies. The agility, suffice it for proof the case of Valdemoro that, His Majesty calling him to Aranjuez, a league from here the brace of the car broke and he told his companion that while they were putting it on they went praying on foot and with the action being so short and the fury of the horses so great that they were 4 in the 3 leagues from there to Valdemoro, not only did they reach him, but he arrived an hour before them and that he enjoyed this good, the reward was of the roughness with which he had macerated his flesh more than the companion reaches you is new wonder and to this day without example. The impossibility is seen in that being his body of flesh, in such a way he made it of stone with the fasts, that it is not

The impossibility is seen in the fact that being his body of flesh, he made it so much of stone with his fasts that it is not possible for natural forces to bear it, adding to this the untiring rigor of his penitences, the excess of his disciplines and the strangeness of them, of which the choir, the altars of the cloister, the chapel of solitude his cell so often covered with streams of blood that obedience washed away to cover up the virtue and particularly the exercise of the mysteries of the Passion in which after the imitation of the others arriving at the Cross, they left him on winter nights 3 hours, tied with ropes in it, this was to be passible*. To take him down from it was not to put him in the sepulcher to rest for 3 days, but in a humble blanket he was kept on the ground for an hour and the following night he returned to the same exercise. Alive were those who gave him the slaps and crucified him whom he commanded in virtue of obedience and to deserve him as Christ in it, still being Provincial he commanded him in virtue of obedience to cease in it and to put him in moderation. And the general, by his command, put him under the obedience of his secretary and ordered him to force him to eat because the rigor of abstinence was so great, and he replied that since his body was already accustomed to it, it would be harmful to his health: the general understood the excuse to be the daughter of the fervor of penance and ordered him to do it again.

The penetrability, if we do not know it from the body, it is enough and even surplus that of the spirit left how much his prayer penetrated the sky, how many inventions of praying he made notorious to the world and it is enough that if the spirit of prophecy is to penetrate, that is how he is called “videns” who being praying in the choir, saw the one who wanted to leave the religion and told him so. And he who having fallen into the well, distant from the cell, called him and he heard him and went to pull him out, tested remains. The clarity, which his soul possesses, is testified by all. That of the body, a single witness who had seen him a sad day, but for the offenses of God, will undo our provanza* that the joy of his face, besides the fact that it did not seem natural, was so continuous that it was seen to redound from the soul and that which remained him dead, is the witness of greater abandonment.

Tuesday, the fathers of the Trinity not having invited any of the sacred religions, workshops and seminaries of holiness to come to celebrate the Saint, they were all moved as daughters of the spirit of their glorious founders, because although they are not of one habit as the main institute is to help justification, which is the end of the law of Christ, any of the righteous is the son of all. This day that of the great patriarch St. Benedict celebrated honors preaching the master fray Antonio Perez his general and master of the university of Salamanca, with the greatness that, of letters so well known must be inferred. He magnified among the others the virtue of his obedience, which was so great that it forced him against humility to reveal the mercy that God had done to him, because asking him for the gift of virginity, he and his most holy mother girded his loins so that he would not feel, as he never felt temptations of the flesh and told the superior: “Do not be careful your father that the same effect causes me the hand on the face of a woman, as a cold iron”.

Wednesday, growing more every day devotion, contest and tears celebrated the religion of the great Father Santo Domingo and preached the teacher fray Cristobal de Torres, preacher of his majesty just man and could be said of the sermon of what St. Thomas said entering to visit St. Bonaventure, found him writing the life of the Seraphim of his father. Let the saint serve the saint, the preacher showed how much ours was and particularly in the virtue of voluntary poverty, which besides of what his majesty and the world know a book did not have because in the doctrine of St. Bernard the leaves of the trees teach more than those of the books and thus the bookstore was the garden. 

Thursday, the religion of the great Father San Francisco bewitched the world, entrusted the sermon to Father Fray Pedro de Tevar who fulfilled his obligation as one who knew of his Father how much he had deserved in virtue of humility assimilated our saint to his. And he pondered that his mother gave birth to him without pain and he died without it although in the doctrine of St. Thomas, the privileges that are in order to us God has to reveal them.

Friday, the religion of the Phoenix Saint Augustine rested his affection in the Master Fray Pedro de Figueroa, who showed by the science of Augustine, the loftiness of the virtue of the modesty of this man that being learned as it is inferred from what he taught for so many years and by the supernatural science that God communicated to him at the pace of prayer as the King Prophet feels it, he knew how to cover it and to reach the simplicity of heart that the apostle asked for and perhaps to seem foolish for Christ. Saturday, day of Saint Teresa, the sacred religion of the Barefoot Trinity performed its duty in father friar Esteban de la Concepción who showed how much this blessed man learned from the saint in the contempt of his person and in him, loftiness of prayer. He made him a companion of Saint Gabriel who, just as the seraphim of [Isaiah] alternated: they intoned to God holy, holy, so Gabriel and Simon gave to Mary Aves in heaven and on the ground to which the distinguished Lope de Vega made a great sonnet.

Sunday, the royal religion of the Merced celebrated the honors and preached the Father Master Fray Francisco Boyl a great sermon, made the saint a bouquet of flowers, appropriating each one to the virtues in which he exercised because the righteous give good smell of Christ and accredit him, that so felt the Apostle and St. Ivan saw the prayers of the Saints in fumes and odors.

Monday, the religion of the humble par excellence saint Francisco de Paula, showed the esteem that this servant of God made of the great humility, because Father Fray Lucas de Montoya made him a portrait of the Saint, in the burning charity with which he worked for the good of the next ones and in the so deep humility of which all were witnesses to him, and more his majesty that when he chose him as his confessor accepted him with that they did not give him gajes, nor call him most reverend, nor that they took from him the treatment with his poor. Tuesday, the holy company of Jesus of whom this man seemed to be a son in the zeal for the salvation of souls, in preaching and confession he was magnified by the hand of Father Hieronymus of Florence, preacher of his majesty and confessor of his brothers in which the old saint even more with tears than with eloquence, as they had known each other for so many years and were friends, he showed the lack that his death causes us and to force us to feel it, he made a great demonstration of his virtues with as much science as piety and getting down from the pulpit he went to adore the place of his sepulcher with which he universally moved everyone.

Wednesday, the sacred religion of Carmen, knowing that all the children of Mary are hers, commanded the master Fray Pedro de Herrera to honor him and he did it in heroic degree, showing that the children of God show that they are, in that if he spoke so our father Fray Simon de Rojas, his saying was to work because he ruled the disease, the health, the sea, the winds, the wills that prevailed, the winds, the wills, which is the most certain sign of sanctity, living the inequality that men have, because in 72 years this man had no contraction in anything, nor did anyone dissent [dissent] of his virtue, something that very few saints are granted, not even Christ himself, so often murmuring of the envy of that people, ungrateful at the same time that benefited.

Thursday, the congregation of the Slaves of the Ave Maria, which had instituted the man of God did him honors and here it is to warn that in that mortal lethargy that gave the holy Queen Margarita, mother of his majesty for so many honors wishing the king who is in heaven, to speak and although she was willing to prepare more to death, as the one who knew what she deserved in any act sent by the father Fray Simon de Rojas. Arriving at San Lorenzo, the king’s thoughts were not uncertain, for, saying Ave Maria in his ear, he replied: “Gratia plena, Father Rojas”. His majesty, seeing the miracle commanded him to ask for mercy and he, looking at the prince of the school St. Thomas said: “I want nothing else, but God and that his majesty make instance with the pontiff who instructs feast to the name of Mary Most Holy and in this archbishopric and Father Rojas had composed the prayer and approving it the apostolic see. And in order that his disposition be seen at his death this last legacy of his soul, which was the greatest good that in his testament he had disposed of, he had begged one day before his death to the Nuncio of his Holiness to make that his sanctity extended it universally and knowing that he was dying and could not attend the diligence he entered the cell of the father master Fray Damián de Haro and ordered him in virtue of obedience to take care of what the nuncio missed it and all that he entrusted business so much his own to nobody, until his death illuminated the wit having given substitute to his desires. This congregation, then, the firstborn of the affections of his soul, invited for the sermon Dr. Francisco Sanchez de Villanueva, preacher and chaplain of his majesty, son and grandson of his servants and son of Father Rojas, who, taking as his theme Simon, great priest of the ancient law, magnified by the Holy Spirit, with the name of the sun, moon and stars, adapted his effects to the virtues of our apostolic man with so much property that the dead man seemed the truth and the other the likeness. And it should be noted that every day the ladies of the court, devotees of Father Rojas, gave achas* and wax was always white, symbol of his innocence.

Friday, the imperial town of Madrid, envious that no one earns it was to honor their children and this was 23 years of assistance and more properly father for the benefits did him honors, attending with maceros* and in the form of villa with so much grandeur of the tomb, ornament and wax that showed the fervent affection he had for him. Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino*, preacher of his majesty, made one of the great regular panegyrics* that I admire the antiquity baptizing him with the catholic truths and with the most elegiac* voices and strangest affections that have been seen linking from one to another so many virtues and prodigies of this man that I do not know how to reduce them to term and among others he remembered the miracle of his white rosaries and in blue cord symbol of the Most Pure Conception, so estimated of his majesty of the king and his brothers of the Christianisms of France, by his letters so grateful and of the whole world venerated without the origin has been raised because the desire that it was not known, until God manifested it. And making him a daughter of confession begged to tell him, she entrusted him with the secret and he has totally forgotten it because God wanted it so without being able to remember it. To her tomb not only universally the people but the monasteries of nuns in baskets sent hundreds of her rosaries to be touched to the body. And the day of his death a person made instance with a donated that served him to give him or to sell him one of the rosaries or beads and not being able to finish it with him, the faith could so much that miraculously without making force a bead was broken and remained in his hand which (oh strange wonder!) touched to a man of 14 years of amancebamiento, totally made him forget the sin.

They had without these glorious obsequies or these glories obsequiales, Saturday in those that made the ecclesiastical state, the learned and religious clergy of Madrid coming in form with cross from the church of Santa Maria, which could not come from another to honors of fray Simon of Ave Maria, which celebrated the royal chapel and every day they said with great music, vigil and mass and that of this day the bishop of Lugo Don Diego Vela, then the sermon by Dr. Paulo de Zamora, priest of San Gines, a man of great erudition, if of greater virtue both things showed in flattering the corpse or more properly the soul of the saint and those of his affections taken by theme: “Et nomen Virginis Maria. ” For if God to honor this name did so many prodigies. This prodigious man was by virtue of God’s honorable end to his prayer thanking the clergy and the sacred religions, the people, the nobility, the ministers, the kings, the honors they had done to the man of God.

The Trinitarian fathers seemed to give them an end, that already urged for days for them the religions of St. Bernard, Merced and Carmen discalced, minor clerics and Capuchins. And in Toledo the holy primate Church of Spain, the religions, the city and university and the council of Cardinal Infante, attended those that his monastery made him, whose printed formula is aura* seen. I hope the same of Valladolid, Burgos, Granada, Seville and Salamanca where to full mouth he was called saint, the slaves of the Blessed Sacrament of the religious monastery of the knight of Grace did him honors, grateful to that 13 continuous years he preached on Saturdays to the mass of Our Lady, where he worked among other 3 prodigies that to 2 women who stood up from the sermon for having told them that her husband and daughter had died, he said to them: “Hail Mary, calm down” and getting down from the pulpit he said to them: “Go to God, you are good and healthy” and so they found them and the conversion of Hamete Moro notorious was whom he called in his obstinacy from the pulpit and was called John. And if these glories have been of joy to all, to no one as to his majesty, for if those of the temporal fathers are the glory of the children as the first truth testifies, those of the spirit and which communicate new and greater being, the more they are of more esteem the better his majesty will think it. I give end, pleading to God what the church assisted of the Holy Spirit says to him the day of my apostle that the one that we had for doctor and teacher on earth, let us have for intercessor in heaven. May he impetrate for his majesties health, happy successes in government, victory over his enemies, long succession and after long days death loving him that he will finally enjoy him eternally.

Minor vassal.

Andres de Mendoza

Licensed, in Madrid, by Bernardino de Guzmán.

To see the Spanish version, modernized and transcribed, click here.

To see the French translation, click here.