Posted on 11/23/2006 9:36:05 PM PST by Salvation
On the morning of July 31, 1926, for the first time in the 400-year history of Catholic Mexico, no priest mounted the steps of an altar to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. By order of the Mexican bishops, and with the approval of Pope Pius XI, the celebration of Mass, the administration of the sacraments, and the day-to-day cycle of devotional exercises were suspended in every cathedral, church, chapel and shrine throughout the country. It was not an interdict; it was a church strike.
For 11 years the Church in Mexico had tried to reach some type of reasonable accord with Mexico's aggressively anti-Catholic government, but without any success. Mexico's president, Plutarco Elías Calles, encouraged the state governors to enact the most stringent laws against the Church in their own districts. In Tabasco, Governor Tomás Garrido Canabal sponsored new legislation that ordered all Catholic priests to marry and outlawed any priest who remained celibate. In other parts of the country priests who offered Mass and administered the sacraments, nuns who kept their vows, laity who sheltered priests or concealed the Blessed Sacrament in their homes did so at the risk of their lives.
At this critical moment in the life of the faith, Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J., came home to Mexico from his studies in Belgium. Immediately Father Pro began to practice a clandestine ministry in Mexico City. Disguised as a mechanic or a student or a man taking his dog for a walk, Father Pro went from house to house, hearing confessions, baptizing infants, blessing marriages, giving last rites to the dying.
When Father Pro was finally arrested it was an accident. Three radicals plotted to assassinate a Mexican general. By chance one of them had bought a used car from Father Pro's brother Humberto. The murder plot failed, the would-be assassins were captured, and their car was traced to the Pros. At the family's home the police arrested Humberto and Father Pro, accusing them of conspiracy to commit murder. The charge was false, but that didn't matter, especially after Humberto admitted that he was active in Catholic organizations and Miguel revealed that he was a Catholic priest. With the explicit approval of Mexico's president, both brothers were sentenced to summary executions.
In the courtyard of the police station Father Pro made the Sign of the Cross over the firing squad and the spectators. "May God have mercy on you," he said. "May God bless you." Then, extending his arms like Christ on the cross, Father Pro cried out, "Viva Cristo Rey!" Long live Christ the King! The soldiers fired and Father Pro fell dead. A few minutes later his brother Humberto met the same fate.
The authorities returned the bodies of Father Pro and his brother to the Pro family, who gave them a joint funeral. As the coffins of the two brothers were carried through the streets of Mexico City people threw flowers from their balconies and thousands joined the procession. Many in the crowd surged forward to touch Father Pro's coffin. Once the committal prayers were finished and the coffins had been lowered into their graves, the martyrs' father approached the two priests who had conducted the funeral and asked them to intone the Te Deum. And so the funeral of the martyrs concluded with a hymn of triumph.
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Blessed Miguel Pro:Heroic Mexican Martyr["VIVA CRISTO REY!"]
Father Miguel Pro: Heroic Mexican Martyr
Blessed Miguel Pro[last dying words:"Viva El Cristo Rey"("Long Live Christ The King")]
Mexican "Cristeros" Martyrs Beatified
A Patron Saint for the Falsely Accused [Father Miguel Augustin Pro, S.J.]
Thank you for the post. I wish I had known this sooner, I would have had some favors to ask of him.
[Blessed Miguel Pro lived in my town, at what was the a Jesuit seminary]
Hmmm, Fr. Pro has not been canonized, yet. How can he be a patron saint?
In the "anti-terrorist" reaction, several innocent people were rounded up, including the Pro brothers. In Mexico, some half-jokingly suggest Miguel Pro should be the patron saint of lottery tickets. When he faced the firing squad he said "I win God's lottery as a martyr." The police station where he was executed was later torn down to build a new headquarters for... of course... the national lottery.
Madre Conchita's home was later seized by the government and given to the Lutherans (to prevent it from becoming a shrine to her (and MOST -- but not all -- of the church has repudiated her followers). It still stands, a couple of blocks from where I lived for several years in Mexico City.
There is a civil rights/civil liberties group -- well respected -- in Mexico named for the Pro brothers. Even Mexicans who are not "clerical" respect them as symbols of those unjustly accused.
Historical Question since this is a period I have not studied, why was Mexico's Government Anti-Catholic, Anti-Clerical?
Madre Conchita was not a "female Osama bin Laden," although I know it's all the rage to refer to her that way. The Church had been under heavy persecution for years with the rising "revolutionary" party of Mexico taking power. Many people did indeed meet at her home, since church services and assemblies were forbidden. But she was a Capuchin nun who was living at home because the convents had been closed by the Mexican government in 1924. She was not a billionaire spending her fortune on fomenting world-wide religious attacks. While I don't approve of violence in any way, the Catholic resistance was not a Catholic "terrorist movement," but a misguided attempt to fight back against the increasingly harsh and restrictive laws imposed by the Mexican leftists.
Whether she was even actually the intellectual author of the crime is in dispute. The actual killer, Toral, was a young man who had been around the fringes for a while, and it is unclear exactly what triggered him to kill Obregon, except possibly that a new set of anti-Catholic laws had recently been imposed.
He was sentenced to death and executed. She was sent to a women's prison, Las Tres Marias, where she spent a number of years and was famed for her kindness and good works to the other prisoners. After about 10 years or so, her sentence was commuted by a new administration that wanted to repair relations with the Church, the heirarchy of which had been in negotiations with the government to restore at least some religious freedom. She had married while in jail(her vows were not permanent)and left prison to take up life with her new husband. She was quite popular in Mexico, where many things are named after her.
Incidentally, it was only a few years ago that Mexican clergy and religious were given the right to appear in public in clerical clothing.
Masons supported by our government were put in power.
Synopsis:
In 1924, Plutarco Elias Calles became President. For this descendant of Spanish Jews, a 33rd degree Mason, "the Church is the unique cause of all Mexico's misfortunes." For him, too, she had to disappear. With the complicity of a Masonic priest, Fr. Perez, proclaimed by the government "Patriarch of the Mexican Catholic Church," Calles founded a schismatic "patriotic Church," as the Communists were to do later in China. The wine used in the Mass was replaced by mescal. But the maneuver was met with widespread contempt. The government could finance the opening of 200 Protestant schools and Calles could smooth the way for heretical sects (already well financed by the US), but the Mexican people remained stubbornly attached to Rome! Their awareness of the supernatural character of their fight did not lead the Cristeros to neglect temporal realities: "Fight and organize; fight and moralize" was one of their mottoes. In the liberated territories, "administrators" were appointed, Catholic schools were opened (more than 200), public sins (drunkenness, prostitution) were suppressed. Does this not offer Catholics a strategy in their fight for the restoration of Christ the King to do likewise: resist and organize; resist and moralize", that is, to resist the popular culture and to organize a solid Catholic educational system.
Article here:
Fr. Pro was executed on the false charge of involvement in an assassination attempt against Álvaro Obregón. True, the government could have chosen to execute him merely for being a priest and saying Mass, but his actual charges were for conspiracy to murder.
Fr. Pro was executed on the false charge of involvement in an assassination attempt against Álvaro Obregón. True, the government could have chosen to execute him merely for being a priest and saying Mass, but his actual charges were for conspiracy to murder.
great post - thank you -- Viva Cristo Rey!
and this Sunday is the Feast of Christ the King.
**At the family's home the police arrested Humberto and Father Pro, accusing them of conspiracy to commit murder. **
**Hmmm, Fr. Pro has not been canonized, yet. How can he be a patron saint?**
I thought that was strange too. And from a Catholic site??? Go figure.
Matbe -- on the way to becoming a saint???
Thank you for all those details! Wow!
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