Veneration and the Patron of the Sick

The popular San Lazaro venerated across the Hispanic and Latin American world draws chiefly on the second biblical Lazarus, the sore-covered beggar of Jesus' parable in Luke 16, who lay at the rich man's gate and was carried after death to Abraham's bosom. From him the saint took his enduring role as patron of the poor, the sick, and above all lepers: medieval leper-hospitals were placed under the name of Lazarus (whence lazaretto and lazar-house), and the crusading Order of Saint Lazarus was founded to care for those afflicted with the disease.

Devotion to San Lazaro as helper of the diseased and the destitute remains intense in Cuba and the wider Caribbean, where pilgrims walk to his shrine to give thanks for healing. As with several such figures, Cuban popular religion has associated his image with an Afro-Cuban counterpart, while in Catholic devotion he is honoured as the beggar raised to glory and the friend of the suffering.