Father Pro: A Mexican Hero
ROBERT ROYALMiguel Pro and the other Mexican martyrs provided millions of people with inspiration to resist the most anti-Catholic government ever seen in the Americas.
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Through photographs distributed worldwide, the Jesuit priest Miguel Augustin Pro thus became the most famous martyr in Mexico’s anti-Catholic revolution early in the twentieth century.
But Pro was hardly alone. Thousands of Catholics died in the same anti-Catholic wave, though few people anywhere, especially in the United States, remember their martyrdom today. President Calles was not only wrong about how Pro would die, he was wrong about Mexico as a whole. Though anti-clerical propaganda long tried to portray the Mexican clergy as corrupt, few of them, few enough to count on one hand, renounced the Faith or caved in to government pressures, even facing death. They all showed a heroic faith so deep that many, like Christ, calmly forgave their executioners before they died.
Americans who go to Mexico today rightly think of it as among the most Catholic nations on earth. Churches and religious festivals are everywhere. Most Mexicans are deeply devout and specially attached to Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is hard to believe that for several decades the Mexican people were subjected to religious outrages equal to anything that even Communism and Nazism perpetrated.
In fact, President Calles admired both the Communists and Hitler. However foolish it might seem from the outside to outlaw Catholicism in a country like Mexico, he banned Masses, expelled the whole Mexican hierarchy, and ordered massacres of simple believers who frequented churches in the absence of the clergy. The governor of the state of Tabasco, Tomas Garrido Canabal was so fanatical in his hatred of the Church that he named his children Lenin, Lucifer, and Satan. We get a good sense of what it was like for Catholics under Canabal’s reign of terror in Tabasco in Catholic novelist Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Greene had visited Mexico and seen the situation first-hand.
Father Pro, then, knew very well what he was risking when, operating underground, he continued saying Mass, hearing confessions, and running "Communion stations" around Mexico City. Thousands came secretly to the sacraments. By a providential combination of circumstances, he was the perfect man for the job. As a young boy he had always loved plays and practical jokes. His natural talents as an actor served him well when he had to deceive the police.
Pro would dress up as a dapper young man when he spoke with women’s groups; the police didn’t expect a priest to be so stylish. If he was visiting car mechanics or drivers, he put on overalls. In one case, he was bringing the Blessed Sacrament to a house where plainclothes detectives were waiting outside. Not wishing to give them the satisfaction of stopping him, he pretended to flash an officer’s badge. The detectives saluted him as he left the house, mission accomplished.
Like many other martyrs, even in jail Pro ministered heroically to the other prisoners. He led them in prayers and songs and kept up everyone’s spirits. The night before he died, he gave his mattress to a sick prisoner while he himself slept on the cell floor.
When Pro’s body, along with his brother Humberto’s, who had also been executed, was taken back to his father’s house, the elder Pro showed the kind of family the Jesuit had sprung from. He ordered no one to mourn, because, he said, there was nothing sorrowful in such heroic deaths. Though the Mexican government had forbidden any public demonstrations, 20,000 ordinary Mexicans crowded into the streets outside the Pro’s home for the funeral.
As the coffins were brought out, someone shouted: "Make way for the martyrs." The crowd fell silent. But as the coffins were driven through the streets, there were shouts of Viva Cristo Rey! everywhere.
Miguel Pro and the other Mexican martyrs provided millions of people with inspiration to resist the most anti-Catholic government ever seen in the Americas. Probably 300,000 Mexicans died in the process. Catholicism would probably have survived underground, as it did in the Soviet Union, whatever the government did. But Father Pro and his fellow martyrs gave Mexico and the rest of the world an example of what it means to follow Christ the King against all the princes of this world.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Royal, Robert. “Father Pro: A Mexican Hero.” Arlington Catholic Herald (2000).
Published by permission of Robert Royal and the Arlington Catholic Herald.
