Confessor Peter Regalati

Peter Regalatus (Spanish: Pedro Regalado; also called Peter Regalati in older English and Latin liturgical sources) was a Franciscan friar of the Observant reform in fifteenth-century Castile. He was born in Valladolid in 1390, of a noble family. Left fatherless in childhood, he was raised by his mother and showed early signs of piety. At about thirteen years of age he entered the Franciscan convent of Valladolid. Drawn to a more rigorous observance of the Rule of Saint Francis, he placed himself under the direction of the reformer Peter of Villacreces and lived at the austere houses of La Aguilera and El Abrojo, which combined eremitical and conventual elements typical of the early Spanish Observance.

Hagiographical tradition, which is abundant but not always independently verifiable, describes him as a man of extreme fasting, corporal mortification, and prolonged prayer, and credits him with miracles including levitation, bilocation, and the reading of hearts. After Villacreces died, Peter Regalatus became superior of La Aguilera and El Abrojo and labored to preserve and spread this reformed Franciscan life in Castile during the first half of the fifteenth century, when the order was marked by conflict between Conventual communities and Observant reformers. He is thus a representative figure of Iberian Franciscan Observance rather than of the later, better-known sixteenth-century Spanish mystics.

He died at La Aguilera on 13 May 1456. A cult grew up at his tomb. Pope Innocent XI beatified him, and Pope Benedict XIV canonized him in 1746. The Roman Martyrology records him on 13 May as a confessor of the Order of Friars Minor, noting humility, patience, and fame for miracles, and linking the entry with Palencia in Spain. He is venerated as a patron of Valladolid; his relics remain associated with the convent and sanctuary of La Aguilera in the province of Burgos. In older calendars he appears as Confessor Peter Regalati, the title “confessor” indicating a saint who was not a martyr.

Devotion to Peter Regalatus has always been strongest in Castile, especially in Valladolid and at La Aguilera. Later liturgical reforms of the universal calendar reduced the number of such regional Franciscan saints in the general Roman books, but his feast continues to be observed on 13 May in Franciscan proper calendars and in parts of Spain. Historical knowledge of his life depends largely on later biographies and process documents prepared for beatification and canonization, which mix archival fact with conventional miracle stories; the outline of his career as an Observant superior in early fifteenth-century Castile is nonetheless consistent across the principal Catholic reference works.