Amadeus of Portugal - Life and Church

Life and Church

He was born João de Menezes da Silva in 1420 in Campo Maior, Portugal, the youngest of the eleven children of Rui Gomes da Silva, the first Magistrate of Campo Maior, on the border of Spain and Portugal, and of Isabel de Menezes, an illegitimate daughter of Dom Pedro de Menezes, 1st Count of Vila Real and 2nd Count of Viana do Alentejo, under whom Silva served in Ceuta. One of his sisters was Saint Beatrice of Silva, a noted Marian mystic and the foundress of the monastic Order of the Immaculate Conception.

Silva, after marrying as a very young man, began his religious life in the Hieronymite monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe, where he spent about ten years. Desirous of joining the Franciscans, he abandoned that life and went to Ubeda, Italy, where he was received into the Order in 1452, entering as a lay brother. He chose to seek Holy Orders after a few years, and was ordained in 1459. After that, while living in various friaries, chiefly in Milan, he attracted attention by his virtue and purported miracles. Under the protection of the Archbishop of Milan, he established the friary of Our Lady of Peace (1469) which became the center of a Franciscan reform. The Minister General of the Order, Francesco della Rovere, extended his protection to him. When later the Minister General became Pope Sixtus IV he called Amadeus to Rome to be his confessor. Other foundations were then made in Italy, among them one at Rome. He returned to Milan, where he died in 1482.