Roman Catholic Saint. Born into a family prominent in the politics of his country, Francisco Luis Febres-Cordero y Muñoz was crippled from birth. Unable to stand until the age of five, he oversaw family opposition when coming to realize his vocation as a lay religious, which once resolved, made him the first native of Ecuador to be received into the Institute of the Brothers of De La Salle. Entering novitiate on March 24, 1868, receiving the religious name of Miguel, he was a gifted teacher from the start, such that when not quite twenty years old he published the first of his many books, a Spanish grammar that soon became a standard text. His research and publications in the fields of literature and linguistics in time put him in touch with scholars all over the world, being granted membership in the national academies of Ecuador and Spain. Despite such high scholastic honors, teaching remained his first priority, especially religion, which enabled him to prepare young boys for first communion. Admired by his students for his simplicity, directness, concern for them and the intensity of his devotion to the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary, he passed through New York on his way to Belgium in 1907, where he had been called to translate texts into Spanish for the use of the Brothers recently exiled from France. His fragile health did not however easily adjust to the rigors of the European climate. Transferred to the junior novitiate at Premia del Mar in Spain, during a revolutionary outbreak in 1909, he supervised a dramatic evacuation of his young charges to the safety of Barcelona across the bay. Shortly after they were able to return he contracted pneumonia and died at Premia on February 9, 1910 aged 55. During the Spanish Civil War his tomb was desecrated and his body was found incorrupt. His corpse, eventually reduced to skeletal remains, was eventually retrieved and transferred to his native Ecuador. Pope Paul VI beatified him on October 30, 1977 while Pope John Paul II declared him saint on October 21, 1984. His liturgical feast day is held on February 9.