Here’s a lovely story by the Detroit Free Press’ David Crumm (who is one of the best religion reporters out there – he find stories – instead of echoing trend pieces) on a gentleman who’s made it his mission to promote devotion to St. Martin de Porres:

A 400-year-old saint who had a gift for feeding and healing needy people may hold the keys to healing some of the world’s deep divisions today, a Detroit man says.

Ernest Haywood, who was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, has launched a personal mission in his retirement years to promote renewed interest in St. Martin DePorres, a Catholic saint born to a Spanish nobleman and a freed black slave in Peru in 1579.

"It is the universality of the Catholic Church that attracted me in the first place during World War II, while I was serving in India," Haywood, 86, said this week. Raised Protestant, he converted to Catholicism while in the military.

"St. Martin’s life also reminds us that, as humans, we are all connected," he said.

In his Detroit home, not far from the Catholic Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament where he and his wife, Regina, are members, Haywood has collected images of the saint and books about him. In the 1990s, Haywood wrote and published a biography of the saint and, more recently, he wrote a screenplay about St. Martin that he is trying to sell.

This summer, Haywood, who is retired from an insurance agency, is organizing what he hopes will be a pilgrimage by metro-area Catholics to Lima, Peru, in 2007 to visit sites important in St. Martin’s life.

"His story is still relevant today," Haywood said, pulling from his bookshelf a tiny, well-thumbed booklet published in 1943, called "Lad of Lima." "This little book is the one that started me on this journey. A friend gave it to me in the 1940s because I was curious about Martin. Reading it really opened my eyes."

Many thanks and a hat tip to Kevin H.!