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Published: November 19, 2007

“Long live Christ the King!”

80th anniversary of martyrdom of Mexican priest to be observed Friday, Nov. 23

Father Miguel Agustín Pro, a Jesuit priest, was executed on Nov. 23, 1927, without due process, by direct and personal orders from Mexican dictator Plutarco Elías Calles, who falsely accused Pro of involvement in an assassination attempt 10 days earlier against former president Álvaro Obregón.

Beatified and declared a martyr in 1988 by Pope John Paul II, Father Pro has been recognized as a martyr by Mexican Catholics from the moment of his death. “Make way for the martyr of Christ!” was the cry that opened the path to Father Pro’s coffin, as thousands of faithful spontaneously gathered to accompany him to the cemetery despite an extremely tense and dangerous atmosphere for Catholics, who, at the time, were being persecuted by the government.

Devotion and veneration of Father Pro grew rapidly among the Mexican immigrant community in the United States because, during the years of persecution, thousands of Catholic families and clerics fled Mexico for the U.S.

The period of anti-Catholic persecution and Catholic resistance known as the Cristero War was provoked by the 1926 “Calles Act,” which prohibited any open worship, closed all Catholic seminaries, convents, schools, orphanages and hospitals, and tried to block any Catholic participation in the country’s public life.

President Calles knew that Father Pro was innocent, as his own police investigation concluded. The true author of the assassination attempt, Luis Segura Vilchis, a highly regarded Catholic who was shot to death along with Father Pro, had voluntarily surrendered to police and admitted his own guilt -- while insisting on Father Pro’s innocence.

Without even presenting him before a judge, Calles ordered Father Pro’s execution by firing squad, and called the press and diplomatic corps to witness the shooting as a public warning to Catholics.

In front of the firing squad, after pardoning his executioners and praying on his knees, Father Pro raised up, with his arms extended in a cross, and, seconds before being shot to death, cried out “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King!), the cry under which thousands of priests, religious men and women, and Catholic lay faithful fell during the years of bloody persecution.

After assassinating several thousands of Catholic resistance leaders, in 1929 Calles consolidated his dictatorship by founding the political party that would govern Mexico without any rival until the year 2000.

In 1992, the Mexican constitution was amended to remove some of its most severe anti-church provisions. Still, some of the ugly features of the anti-Catholic regime of the 1920s and 1930s persist to the present day. Churches cannot own radio or TV stations, religious education is restricted, and priests are still forbidden from any involvement in politics.

For example, in April, the Archbishop of Mexico City, Cardinal Norberto Rivera, and his spokesman, Father Hugo Valdemar, were charged with crimes – charges later dismissed -- and virulently attacked by politicians of two political parties for publicly opposing the legalization of abortion in Mexico’s capital city, the Federal District. Detractors of the cardinal and his spokesman said the two had violated Mexico’s laws guaranteeing a secular state.

© California Catholic Daily 2007. All Rights Reserved.