Luis de Granada

Luis de Granada, born Luis de Sarria in 1504 in Granada, came from a family of very modest means in a city that had only recently passed from Nasrid to Castilian rule. His father died while he was still a small child, and his mother earned a living by washing clothes. The child’s intelligence and demeanor attracted the notice of the Mendoza family, the counts of Tendilla who served as captains-general of the kingdom of Granada; they took him into their household and had him educated with their own sons, an opportunity that his birth would otherwise have denied him. In 1524 he entered the Dominican convent of Santa Cruz la Real in Granada and took the religious name Luis de Granada, by which he has been known ever since.

After profession he was sent to the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid, a leading Dominican studium, where he received a solid training in scholastic philosophy and theology. Returning to southern Spain, he gained a wide reputation as a preacher and as an advocate of a stricter, more contemplative form of Dominican life. He spent a period at the house of recollection of Scala Coeli near Córdoba and later served as prior of several convents. His sermons drew large crowds, and he was sought as a confessor and spiritual guide by people of many conditions. By the middle of the sixteenth century his name was known well beyond Andalusia.

In the mid-1550s he was summoned to Portugal. There he was elected provincial of the Portuguese province of the Order of Preachers and became an influential figure at court, serving especially as confessor and counsellor to Queen Catherine of Austria, the widow of King John III and sister of the Emperor Charles V. He declined the archbishopric of Braga, the primatial see of Portugal, and refused other high ecclesiastical offices, remaining a simple friar. From that time until his death he resided chiefly in Lisbon, at the Dominican convent, while continuing to preach, to govern in the order, and to write.

Granada composed his principal works in Castilian rather than Latin, intending them for priests, religious, and literate laypeople alike. The Libro de la oración y meditación (Book of Prayer and Meditation) and the Guía de pecadores (The Sinner’s Guide), both first issued in the 1550s, were reprinted many times in the author’s lifetime and translated into numerous languages; they rank among the most widely read Catholic spiritual books of the early modern period. He also wrote the Memorial de la vida cristiana, the Introducción del símbolo de la fe, and a number of sermons, treatises on the commandments and sacraments, and lives of saints. The Spanish Index of prohibited books issued in 1559 under Inquisitor General Fernando de Valdés included some of his writings, a measure that caused him pain and led him to revise certain texts; the works were subsequently circulated with approval. Teresa of Ávila recommended his books, and later writers such as Charles Borromeo and Francis de Sales drew on them.

In his last years Granada suffered from poor health and progressive loss of sight, becoming blind, yet he continued to dictate new works and to offer spiritual counsel. He died in Lisbon on 31 December 1588. He was never beatified or canonized, and he has no universal feast day, but he was remembered in his order and in Portugal and Spain as a model of Dominican preaching and interior life. His books remained in print for centuries and helped to shape the devotional culture of Catholic Europe and of the Spanish and Portuguese overseas worlds in the age of the Catholic Reformation.