Feast day: May 21

Sts. Christopher Magallanes & Companions

Priests & Martyrs · d. 1915–1937

Patron of Mexico

A Mexican parish priest and twenty-four companions, mostly priests, shot during the anti-Catholic persecution of the Cristero years for ministering to their people.

Christopher Magallanes and his companions were a group of twenty-five Mexican martyrs — twenty-two priests and three laymen — killed between 1915 and 1937 during the fierce anticlerical persecutions that accompanied and followed the Mexican Revolution, above all the Cristero War.

In those years the revolutionary governments of Mexico enacted and brutally enforced laws against the Church: priests were forbidden to wear clerical dress or minister in public, churches were closed, and the celebration of the sacraments became a capital risk. Many priests continued in secret to serve their people.

Christopher Magallanes was a parish priest of Totatiche in Jalisco who, when the seminaries were shut, opened a clandestine seminary to keep training priests. Arrested in 1927 on a false charge of abetting the Cristero rebels, he was shot without trial — but not before giving away his few possessions and absolving his executioners, declaring that he died innocent and prayed his death might bring peace to Mexico.

He and his companions — most of them ordinary parish priests, killed simply for exercising their ministry — were canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000. They are honoured together as witnesses to the faith in modern Mexico.

Forbidden to function as a priest, Christopher Magallanes ran a secret seminary; arrested on the way to say Mass, he absolved his executioners before they fired.

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/2000/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_20000521_canonizations.html