Saint Paschal Baylon: The Saint Who Opened His Eyes One Last Time to Adore the Eucharist

Saint Paschal Baylon: The Saint Who Opened His Eyes One Last Time to Adore the Eucharist

On May 17, 1592, inside a church in Villarreal, Spain, there is an open coffin in front of the main altar, the body of an elderly and humble friar, with his brown habit patched in several places, his hands crossed on his chest, his eyes closed. He has been dead since yesterday, his skin already cold, his face motionless. The priest celebrates the funeral mass. The church is full and when the moment of consecration arrives, the priest raises the host with both hands and then something happens that none of those present will ever forget.

The dead man’s eyes open slowly, calmly, like someone waking from a dream, and turn upwards towards the host that the priest holds high on the altar, and remain fixed on it throughout the elevation. When the priest lowers the host, the eyes close gently. The whole church has seen it. Nobody moves. No one breathes, and when the second ascent arrives, the dead man’s eyes open for the second time. Who was this man? He was not a priest, nor a bishop, nor a preacher, nor a great theologian. I had never studied at any university or seminary. In fact, he learned to read on his own, as an adult, by tracing letters with a stick on the dusty roads of Aragon. He spent 17 years of his life in the fields, alone with a flock of sheep and the sky above.

And yet, when the most educated Calvinist preachers in France surrounded him in a public square to prove to him that Christ could not really be present in the Eucharist, that illiterate pastor left them completely speechless. Men with decades of theological training, unable to refute a man who had not even finished elementary school. How is that possible? This is not a story of supernatural powers or great conquests. It is the story of a man who chose to love one thing with all that he had, and that love ended up manifesting itself in a way that defies any rational explanation. A story that has been generating questions for more than four centuries that historians and theologians have not yet finished answering.

This is the story of Saint Paschal Baylon, the shepherd whom nobody cared about, whom the whole world forgot during his life, and whom, nevertheless, heaven never stopped looking at for an instant. To understand what Pascual became, we must begin by understanding where he came from. Torre Hermosa is a small village nestled in the mountains of southern Aragon, in northeastern Spain, with low stone and adobe houses, narrow streets filled with yellow dust by the dry mountain winds every spring, and a stillness that in the fifteenth century must have seemed absolute, almost timeless. Martín Bailón and Isabel Juvera lived there, a farming couple without their own land. They had no recognition, no wealth, and no influence.

What they did have was something that in fifteenth-century Spain was worth as much as daily bread. A living faith, without embellishments or political and religious ideologies. The rosary at nightfall before dinner, Sunday mass, the confidence that God did not forget the little ones, even though it sometimes seemed that way. It was in that house on May 16, 1540, that a child was born whom they called Pascual, because that day was the feast of Pentecost, the day on which Christian tradition remembers the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles fifty days after Easter Sunday. That child who came into the world in the poverty of an adobe house in Aragon, would carry, without knowing it yet, the fire of that day engraved inside him for his entire life. And he would also die on a Pentecost day, as if the arc of his existence had been drawn from the beginning with a precision that does not belong to men and to this world.

But that was still a long way off. For the moment, Pascual was simply the youngest son of a poor farming family, growing up among goats and open fields in a forgotten corner of Spain from which no one expected much. When Pascual turned seven, his father put a wooden staff in his hand and explained that this would be his job from then on: to take care of the flock, take it to pasture at dawn, bring it back at dusk, and everything else he needed to learn on his own. There was no school, not because the parents didn’t want it, but because in the rural world of fifteenth-century Spain, a child of landless farmers simply did not have access to education. There was work and there was poverty, and between the two there was no room left for books and knowledge.

So Pascual grew up in the fields alone for days on end with the flock and the horizon. And in that silence something strange began to develop within him. He had heard at home that the friars and nuns divided the day into hours of prayer, the so-called canonical hours, and that they prayed at dawn, at noon, in the afternoon, and at nightfall. Pascual felt in his heart that he wanted to do the same. The problem was that in the middle of the countryside, without a bell tower or clock, it was impossible to know what time it was. He solved it by building a sundial. He looked for a straight stick, stuck it in the ground in a clear place and for several days watched how the shadow moved, marking stones on the ground to indicate each hour.

When the shadow reached one of his marks, he would kneel wherever he was and pray, even if his sheep were scattered across the opposite hillside and he had to leave his staff lying on the ground. He also wanted to learn to read. He had no teacher or mentor, he had no books, he had no paper. When he encountered someone literate on the road, a merchant, a passing clergyman, a student from a nearby town, he would stop him and ask him to teach him letters. Then he would trace them on the ground with a stick, repeating them until they stuck in his mind, and the next day he would write them down again so as not to forget them. Thus, with no tools other than his will, he slowly learned to read and write. Using rushes he found by the streams, he made small rosaries which he then gave to the other shepherds in the valley.

Some accepted them with laughter, others put them in their pockets without saying anything out of politeness, and more than one started using them secretly when others weren’t looking. There was a small hermitage dedicated to Our Lady of the Sierra, not far from where he used to take the flock. Whenever the other shepherds started speaking with words that Pascual found offensive, he would get up without arguing, without giving explanations, and go to the hermitage. There he remained alone in the cool silence of those stones, speaking to the Virgin Mary as a son speaks to his mother. And one day in the fields near Elche something happened that Pascual would never tell, except to a trusted friar. Many years later the bells rang in the distance, the bells of consecration, those that announce that in some church, in some town that he could not see from where he was, the priest had just raised the consecrated host.

Pascual fell to his knees in the dust of the field and then, without moving from where he was, he saw something that no rational explanation can completely cover. He saw the host raised above the chalice, surrounded by a light that was not that of the sun, but like snow, as if the walls of that distant church had become transparent only for him. His foreman, who happened to be passing by, found him on his knees with his face turned towards the horizon. He asked him what he was doing. Pascual didn’t know what to answer. He got up, dusted off his clothes, and continued walking behind the flock as if nothing had happened. Some people learn about God only from academic books, while others learn about Him in the silence of nature.

The years passed and Pascual grew up. When he was over twenty years old, his boss, a man named Martín García, called him aside one day and made him an offer that few young men in that region would have refused. Martín García was one of the richest men in the area. He had land, cattle, a large, well-built house, and an unmarried daughter. And he had seen in Pascual something that he had not found in the other shepherds who worked for him. An honesty that did not need to be monitored, a calm that no unforeseen event could break. He offered him land, he offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and with it the promise of inheriting everything he had built. For a poor young man from Aragon, it was the offer of a whole life solved in one fell swoop.

Pascual listened without interrupting, and when Martín García finished speaking, he responded in a calm voice, without drama, like someone announcing a decision that had been made for some time. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, but I am resolved to become a religious person. From now on I promise you that I will enter the convent. There was no further discussion possible. He divided among his sisters the small portion of the family inheritance that belonged to her. He said goodbye to his parents with great pain and sadness, but at the same time convinced and excited to give his life completely to God, living, eternal king and creator of the universe, and to the service of souls. And he set off barefoot south, looking for a community that would welcome him.

He found it in Loreto, a town in Valencia, where the Franciscan friars had a small house. And on February 2, 1564, the feast of the purification of the Virgin, Pascual received the habit of the order. He was twenty-four years old. His superiors, seeing his natural ability to learn and the depth of his devotion, suggested that he prepare to become a priest. It was the logical path and the one that God had possibly destined for him. Pascual humbly but without hesitation asked them to let him in as a Lego brother, without holy orders, without a pulpit, just the brown habit and the lowest jobs in the house. And when they asked him why, he simply replied that he wanted to be the broom of God’s house. He didn’t choose the highest place, he chose the place closest to the ground.

For years, life in the convent passed with a peace that Pascual had taken his whole life to achieve. He swept, cooked, tended the garden, and attended to the poor who came to ask for bread at the gate. His brothers liked him, his superiors trusted him, and in 1573 he was transferred to the convent of studies in Valencia, the most important in the province, where the young friars who were going to be ordained were trained. There began the darkest stage of his life. The superior of that house, the guardian, was a man of severe character and difficult temperament. And from the moment he met Pascual, something about him irritated her deeply. Perhaps it was the tranquility that Brother Lego radiated, perhaps it was the devotion that was uncomfortable and envious to those who observed it from the outside. Perhaps something simpler: the unease that the presence of someone who has no ambitions sometimes causes in certain people.

The humiliations began without warning in front of everyone, for no apparent reason. One day, during lunch, the guardian got up from his seat, crossed the refectory in silence while all the friars stared at their plates, and stood in front of Pascual. And in a loud voice, so that no one could pretend not to hear, he said to him, “You are a hypocrite, a presumptuous and proud man. You think you are better than others and you are nothing but a liar.” The entire room froze. The young friars did not dare to raise their eyes. The older ones looked at Pascual out of the corner of their eyes, waiting for a reaction, a protest, at least a gesture of discomfort. Pascual said nothing, slowly got up from the bench, went down to the floor and on all fours, crawling across the cold stones of the refectory, he crossed the room to where the guard was, took his feet in his hands and kissed them once, again and again, without raising his face even once.

Then he got up, returned to his seat, and finished his meal. That same afternoon, when some of the friars tried to console him privately, telling him that what had happened was unjust, Pascual looked at them with an expression none of them could quite decipher and replied, “Your words haven’t saddened me. I consider myself so happy that I would like to receive such consolation every day.” The humiliations continued for three years, one after another, in public, in private, without reason or explanation. And Pascual never complained, but something was struggling inside. One night, the provincial superior, Pedro de Sena, who had traveled to the monastery for a visit, found Pascual alone in a corner of the cloister and found him weeping, not with the discreet weeping that can be concealed, but with the broken voice of someone who can bear no more.

And Pascual murmured with the effort of someone who says aloud what he has kept inside for too long, “Oh, Father, it’s all useless. I can’t go on. If I were granted to cease to exist…” The provincial embraced him in silence. And something was still missing. Because at night, the friars who slept in the cells next to Pascual’s began to hear inexplicable noises: sharp knocks against the wall, muffled cries, sounds of a struggle inside a room locked from the inside. When they ran to the corridor and pounded on the door, no one answered until dawn. And the next day, Pascual would appear in the refectory with marks he hadn’t had the night before: bruises, contusions, signs of a fight he never described and about which he never said a word. But the night passed, and the next, and all the nights that followed. And Pascual remained standing, silent with the fire burning.

When the trials in Valencia ended, Pascual returned to his usual life: the gatehouse, the kitchen, the garden, his satchel on his shoulder when he had to go out to collect alms in the nearby villages, the ups and downs of stairs—the daily life of one who holds no office or rank, but is always burdened with the extra tasks and the journeys, because the superiors frequently sent him from one monastery to another, and between one monastery and the next lay leagues of dry, stony land, which Pascual crossed barefoot in his worn tunic, his satchel empty or full, depending on the time of the journey. He had a habit that those who knew him remembered more clearly than anything else after his death. When he met someone on the road, whether a farmer, a merchant, a friar from another order, or a beggar, he didn’t say good morning, nor did he ask about the weather or the harvest. Instead, he would say in a low voice, with the naturalness with which one states something known to be true, “How good God is,” or simply, “Let us love Jesus very much.” And he would continue walking.

Some laughed when he had already gone. Others stood for a moment on the road, watching him disappear into the distance, not quite knowing that he had left those five words in their hearts. In 1575, his superiors entrusted him with a specific mission: to deliver documents to the monastery of Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain, where the provincial superior’s nephew was stationed, a young man named Juan Jiménez, still a teenager and preparing to enter the consecrated life. Pascual arrived at the monastery one evening after several days of travel. Juan saw him enter from the other side of the church. A barefoot man in a patched tunic, without a cloak over his shoulders to protect him from the evening chill, knelt in a secluded corner, kissed the ground with his forehead, and remained there motionless, silent, unmoving. When Pascual finally rose and approached Juan, he looked at him silently for a moment, as if reading him, and then said with the same naturalness with which he asked for simple things, “Give me this boy for the love of Jesus and Saint Francis.” And the boy went with him.

The return journey was one hundred leagues, more than four hundred kilometers, from Andalusia to Valencia. Juan, because of his age and condition, rode on horseback. Pascual ran barefoot beside him along roads crowded with stones and dust under the summer sun. When Juan begged him to get on his horse to rest, Pascual politely refused. The only thing he eventually agreed to, after much insistence, was to remove his cloak during the hottest hours so as not to sweat too much. At night, when they stopped at rest stops along the way and Juan lay down exhausted, Pascual didn’t go to bed; he knelt in a corner of the room and spent hours there. That boy, Juan Jiménez, would later become Pascual’s first biographer, the one who remembered every detail, the one who preserved for us the memory of those years of walking and silence.

Sometime in the 1570s, the Franciscan superiors entrusted Pascual with a mission that was considerably more dangerous than any other they had assigned him until then. He had to cross the Pyrenees, enter France, and personally deliver some important documents to the Minister General of the Order, who was in French territory at that time. The problem was that France in those years was torn apart by wars of religion. Calvinism had taken firm root in large parts of the country, and the tension between Catholics and Protestants was so real and so commonplace that crossing certain provinces dressed in a Franciscan habit was, in the worst cases, tantamount to crossing them with a target painted on one’s chest. The Huguenots, as the French Calvinists were called, had a particular aversion to one of the most central dogmas of Catholicism: the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The idea that the bread consecrated at Mass was not a symbol, but the true body and blood of Christ, seemed to them idolatry that justified any confrontation.

Pascual entered Huguenot territory with his Franciscan habit visible to all, making no attempt to hide, with torn sandals and an old tunic. He was recognized almost immediately. A group began to follow him. Word spread through the town, and when Pascual arrived at the square, a crowd had already gathered around him. And among the crowd was a Calvinist preacher who saw in that friar a perfect opportunity, an easy public victory. In front of all his faithful, he stood before Pascual and issued the challenge aloud. “Show us, friar, that your God is in that piece of bread you worship. Show us that there is more than flour in your host.” The square fell silent. Everyone stared at the small, barefoot man, without notes, without any pre-prepared arguments.

And Pascual spoke, not like a theologian. He didn’t quote the Church Fathers, nor offer philosophical arguments about transubstantiation. He spoke of the only thing he knew firsthand: that day in the fields of Elche, when the bells rang in the distance and he fell to his knees in the dust, unable to explain what he was seeing; of the nights in the convent, kneeling before the tabernacle, with a certainty that came not from any interpretation of the Bible and the Holy Scriptures, but from something happening within him as he prayed, from the burning in his chest, from the peace, which is not the absence of pain, but the presence of God. Something that men have no words to accurately name. The preacher opened his mouth to respond and searched his arsenal of theological arguments for the appropriate answer to what he had just heard, but he found none because what Pascual had said was not an argument that could be refuted with another argument; it was a testimony. And testimonies have a different kind of solidity.

The crowd waited. But there were those who, instead of an intellectual response, chose another way out. A group rushed at Pascual, beat him, knocked him down against the stones of the square, opened cuts on his head, split his lip, and left him with bruises that would take weeks to disappear. Pascual did not defend himself, and when he was able to get up and move away from the tumult, he did so walking, not running, as if haste had always been a lack of respect for what had just happened. He managed to finish the journey, handed over the documents, crossed back over the Pyrenees, and when he arrived at his convent, no one knew anything about it, not a word. Only after his death, when the investigation into his death began, did the matter come to light. After testimonies were taken in France and his sanctity was recognized, what had happened in that square came to light. The man who hadn’t finished primary school had left those who had spent decades studying theology speechless, not because he was more intelligent, but because he had spent forty years speaking about something he himself had experienced. And that has a solidity that no argument can replace.

The final years of Pascual’s life were spent in the Villarreal convent, in the province of Castellón. His superiors had sent him there in 1589, when he was already forty-nine years old and his body was beginning to show the weight of decades of barefoot marches, sleepless nights kneeling on the cold floor, and fasts that had left his bones with a fragility from which he could not recover, but his inner life remained the same as always. The brothers of the convent later described him as someone who, the older he appeared outwardly, the more luminous he seemed inwardly, as if the fire he had kept hidden in his chest all his life was beginning to become too large for the vessel that contained it. In May of 1592, Pascual fell ill. A fever that wouldn’t break, an exhaustion that prevented him from getting out of bed.

The friars who cared for him understood there was no turning back. Pascual asked them for only one thing: that they read aloud the account of Christ’s Passion, that the last words he heard in this world be those that tell how the one he had loved all his life gave his own for him. And as a friar slowly read the Gospel, Pascual closed his eyes. It was May 17, 1592, Pentecost Sunday, the same day Pascual had been born fifty-two years earlier in that adobe house in Torre Hermosa. The arc of his life closed exactly where it had begun. His body was taken to the convent church and placed in an open coffin in front of the main altar so that the faithful could come and say goodbye. The next day, the funeral Mass began. The church was full: friars, neighbors, peasants, some nobles from the nearby villages.

The priest began the celebration of Mass, reached the moment of consecration, raised the host, and the dead man’s eyes slowly opened, with a calmness that no one in that church could describe. They opened and turned upward, toward the host that the priest held aloft, and remained fixed there throughout the elevation. When the priest lowered the host, the eyes closed. Several witnesses in the front row fell to their knees in surrender. Others wept. An elderly friar who had known Pascual for decades simply bowed his head without saying a word. The second elevation came. The priest raised the chalice, and the eyes opened a second time. Pascual Bailón had loved the sacrament of the Eucharist all his life, and when he no longer had life, he loved it once more.

The news spread through the villages of the region before the day was over. And in the following days, pilgrims arrived from farther afield. The miracles attributed to him began. Through his intercession, a blind woman regained her sight before his relics because of her beautiful faith. Terminally ill patients improved in ways that the doctors of the time could not explain. The canonization process, when it was formally opened, gathered eight volumes of testimonies with thousands of pages. In 1618, Pope Paul V declared him blessed, seventy-two years after his death. And in 1690, Pope Alexander VII proclaimed him a saint. But the final piece of his story came in 1897, when Pope Leo XIII did something no one expected: he declared Saint Paschal Baylon the universal patron saint of all Eucharistic Congresses in the world and of all forms of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.

The illiterate shepherd who, as a child, could not attend Mass because he had to be in the fields tending his flock like a good shepherd, who adored the Eucharist from afar when he heard the bells in the distance, became the patron saint of all who adore the Eucharist throughout the world. There are things that can only be explained if one accepts that there is a greater order than the human one that organizes them. Pascual Bailón left none of the traces we normally associate with great service to the Catholic religion, but rather to the Mystical Church of Christ. He didn’t found a religious order, he didn’t write any theological treatises. He didn’t preach in the town squares or influence the great debates of his time. He was a doorkeeper, he was a cook, he was a sweeper. He spent fifty-two years in the jobs that others left for last place.

All his greatness lay precisely where no one looked: in the look that transformed in his eyes when the priest elevated the host, in the hours of the night kneeling before the tabernacle while the other friars slept, in the small words he whispered when he crossed paths with someone on the road to sow the seed of the word of God, in the fire, the wisdom, and the discernment he carried within him throughout his life, never asking anyone to recognize him, no title or position. And that fire was so real, emanating from the Holy Spirit, so sustained, so completely genuine, that it manifested itself even when the body that had housed it no longer breathed. If there is one thing that Pascual’s story teaches, it is that constant love, practiced in silence for decades without witnesses and without visible reward, ends up having a weight that surpasses any political and religious ideology, that the coherence between what one believes and what one lives has a power that no argument can imitate.

The world of the sixteenth century had its theologians, its preachers, its great intellectuals of the faith, and none of them left the same mark on the souls of men as an illiterate shepherd from Aragon, who knew nothing else but to love, work, and shepherd. For the tree observes the sap that flows from its roots through its branches and the fruit produced by the seed that fell on good soil. You are trees, and all of you are branches of the tree. Saint Pascual Bailón, you who learned to know God in the silence and peace of the fields. You who built a sundial to know when to pray, because you needed to speak with Him and couldn’t wait. You who were humiliated for years, who asked to be the broom of God’s house, and who never once in your life sought anyone’s applause. Intercede tonight for those who hear your story, for those who bear unseen labors and uncelebrated loyalties. For the poor in spirit who feel their faith is too small, too lukewarm and dry.

For those who seek God without quite knowing how to find Him or without being entirely sure they want to find Him. Saint Paschal, you who loved all your life something others couldn’t see, ask Christ present in the Eucharist, the One you loved more than your own life, to kindle in each of us a spark of the Holy Spirit, of that fire you carried within. That when we feel empty, we may remember that there is a presence that doesn’t depend on our mood, our consistency, or our merits. That when the world asks us to be great and visible, let us remember that you were small and silent, and that was enough. And when our time comes, may we close our eyes with the same peace with which you closed yours on Pentecost Sunday in Villarreal, knowing that the love and mercy that awaits us on the other side is the same that has accompanied us from the beginning, even though we have often not seen it. Saint Paschal Baylon, pray for us.

Before this video ends, I would like to ask you something very simple. If Paschal’s story has touched your heart, please leave in the comments the name of the saint you would like us to talk about next time. I read all the comments, and many of the stories already published on this channel came here because of a suggestion like yours. And if you want to continue discovering lives of faith that change the way we see the difficulties and hardships we endure, here on the channel are two more stories waiting for you: one about Saint John Bosco, the priest of the most dangerous neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Turin, the father of many children orphans he rescued, and that of Saint Catherine of Siena, the fourteenth-century young woman who, without having studied theology, ended up being an advisor to popes and kings. Thank you so much for getting this far. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Mary, Mother of Divine Grace, Mother of Divine Mercy, Defend us from our enemies and protect us now and at the hour of our death. Amen. O my good Jesus, forgive us all our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of your mercy. Sacred Heart of Jesus, I trust in you. Immaculate Heart of Mary, be the salvation of my soul. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.