Posted on 08/22/2025 7:20:31 PM PDT by ebb tide
The Rise and Fall of the Cristeros
Part III
“The country is a jail for the Catholic Church. In order to be logical, a Revolution must gain the entire soul of a nation. They will have to open a jail for each home, and they don’t have enough handcuffs or hangmen to bind up the hands and cut off the heads of the martyrs. We are not worried about defending our material interests, because these come and go; but our spiritual interests, these we will defend because they are necessary to obtain our salvation.”[1]
The body of the man who wrote those words, Anacleto Flores (“El Maestro”), was dumped on an untended patio after his execution. Also dumped were the bodies of Juan Padilla and Ramon and Jorge Vargas, who had sheltered Flores from government persecution.
The bodies were taken home by family members and a period of mourning began. Doña Elvira, the mother of Ramon and Jorge, quieted a crying relative by saying, “You know that our mission as mothers is to raise our children to heaven.” The Vargas’ had sheltered many Catholics during the persecutions without mishap. Did they regret sheltering Anacleto Flores? Jorge’s sister Maria Louisa recalled:
“We had already had in our house various priests and a group of young seminarians, but never a chief of the Cristeros. The responsibility of lodging him was enormous, but it was impossible to close the doors against him—this, never.”[2]
The doors were also open at the Flores home, where hundreds of mourners came to touch the body of El Maestro and console his young widow and children. Did Senora Flores regret her husband’s life? Gathering her sons around their father’s body she told them: “Look. This is your father. He has died defending the Faith. Promise me on his body that you will do the same when you get older if God asks it of you.”
The next day thousands of Catholics ignored the law and police intimidation to join a procession with the bodies of the martyrs. They prayed and sang hymns to Christ the King and the Virgin of Guadalupe as they slowly walked to the cemetery in Mezquitan for burial.
The police wisely did nothing to prevent the (technically illegal) procession. In a face saving move the government claimed the executions occurred because the martyrs conspired to kill an American in order to stir up trouble between the United States and Mexico – as if the government needed any help doing that.[3]
The Revolution’s statement was a lame slander at best – not even the murdered American’s wife believed it. The Church gave her verdict in November 2005, when Anacleto Gonzalez Flores was beatified (along with Padilla, Vargas, and other Mexican martyrs).
The Clergy and the Cristeros
In August 1926 Calles had confidently predicted that the Cristero uprising would be repressed within weeks. “It will be less a campaign than a hunt,” boasted General Ferreira.[4] Nine months later the General promised an end to armed conflict by Midsummer 1927. But the peasant guerillas kept winning battles.
Calles blamed their stubbornness on the Church, whom he claimed was aiding and abetting the Cristeros in their rebellion. Few statements – even from Calles – could have been more inaccurate. It was true many priests were martyred, but rarely because they supported the Cristeros. The clergy was considered dangerous, and of course to the Revolution they were, though not in a military sense.
Here was another case of Calles and the Mexican government not comprehending reality. They thought if they strung up enough Cristeros from telephone poles – and there are pictures showing Mexican Catholics dangling from nooses on telephone poles, the dead bodies stretching to the horizon – the Catholics would be intimidated.
Twenty-seven Cristeros were summarily executed at Sahuayo. Only Claudio Becerra was spared, because he was a boy. Later he wept at the tomb of the twenty-seven, saying, “I am sorry that God did not want me as a martyr.” Age was not always a barrier to martyrdom: when young Honorio Lamas was executed with his father, he whispered to his mother before the final volley, “How easy Heaven is now, mother!”
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