The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. St. Martin of Tours whose memory the Church honors today was born in Pannonia (what is now Hungary) to pagan parents. He was a soldier before being baptized at the age of eighteen. He founded a monastery in France at Liguge (the first one in the West) and later became the Bishop of Tours. He sent missionaries to evangelize the country and to educate the clergy. He was also noted for his opposition to the practice of executing heretics. St. Martin was the first non-martyr with annual feast in the Western Church. He is the patron saint of soldiers, wine producers, and of France. 
An account in the life of St. Martin of Tours which has become almost synonymous to the name is him, while still a soldier, cutting his cloak in two in order to give half of it to a beggar clad only in rags in the depth of winter. It was a gesture whose importance is seen in its duplication in the lives (biographies) of saints in the Middle Ages. It is also perhaps the reason for the choice of the Feast’s Gospel passage, the Last Judgment. 
The Last Judgment scene presents us with the criteria that Jesus will use to separate the righteous from the non-righteous at the end of time. And that criteria is love. At the last judgment, the only one question that Jesus will ask us is how much did we love while we were here on earth. Once who is familiar with the last judgment scene does realize that those questions that Jesus will ask us – whether we fed the hungry and the thirsty, welcomed the stranger and clothed the naked, visited the sick and those in prison – are all expressions of love. Love is the essence and goal of creation. God created the human person out of love, and it is only through love that a follower of Jesus fully lives his/her call. When St. Martin encountered the poorly clad beggar on that cold, winter day, he was moved to cut into two his expensive cloak because of his love for a fellow brother. It was an act that came to define the Christian virtue of charity for his contemporaries. Unbeknownst to him, he was creating a precedent that many after him would try to emulate.