Spanish Saints in the Spanish Netherlands

In the seventeenth century, the Roman proclamations of beatification or canonization generated a large number of festivities and spectacular events in many parts of the Monarchy of Spain. Yet, in the Netherlands, they received a fainter echo and left a limited number of sufficiently documented testimonies. Two cases, however, are exceptions: the canonization of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier triumphantly celebrated by the Belgian Jesuits in 1622, and the beatification of Francisco Borgia in 1624, i.e., the elevation to the Catholic pantheon of three Spanish saints rejoiced by an order marked by its hispanophile nature, in provinces recently returned to the Spanish Crown. I will seek to define the Hispanic features of these events and I will particularly stress the very noticeable way how the Spanish communities, present in the Low Countries, committed themselves in these festivities.