Miguel Pro reaches California exile a week after last seeing his mother

LOS GATOS, California, October 9, 1914 AD — Fourteen young Mexican Jesuits, driven out of their novitiate by revolutionary soldiers, reached the Jesuit house at Los Gatos, California, today, a week after their train left Guadalajara. Among them was Miguel Pro, 23, whom the Church beatified in 1988 AD as Blessed Miguel Pro. He left behind his mother and four younger brothers and sisters, living with almost nothing in Guadalajara, a city held by revolutionary troops.

The young men were training to be priests, and the revolution had turned on the Church. Venustiano Carranza had raised an army against the government of President Victoriano Huerta, accused the Catholics of backing Huerta, and set out to break their influence. His troops marched into Mexico City on August 20 under banners that read “El clero es el obscurantismo; la libertad es la luz” (The clergy is obscurantism; liberty is light). The Jesuit superiors judged that keeping the novitiate open would put the young men’s lives at risk.

The novitiate at El Llano, in the state of Michoacán, housed both novices and young Jesuits like Miguel Pro. He had finished his two years as a novice, taken his first vows and moved on to his studies. Carranza’s soldiers raided the house on the night of August 4. About midnight twenty-two horsemen forced the porter to open the gates and galloped up to the house, firing. They broke in with axes, smashed furniture, cut the telephone wires and demanded the account books.

Ten days later the superiors closed the house. On August 14 they took down the door-plates, the lists of names and the statue of Our Lady, and anything else that showed it was a religious house. Each of them could take one book with him. Of textbooks, a novice wrote in his diary, “not one.” On August 15, the feast of the Assumption, they left in small groups in lay clothes. Miguel Pro set out on foot with three others, a year to the day after he had made his first vows there.

He spent two weeks in Zamora, a walled town nearby that was full of revolutionary troops. The commander who held the town closed the churches, ordered every priest to report to him on August 20, and jailed the priests who came. On August 24 Miguel Pro helped carry food to priests hiding in a hut at the foot of a hill outside town, and lay in a cornfield with the others while a patrol of revolutionaries passed below.

On August 29 he got out of Zamora dressed as a peon, in a high-crowned hat, white linen trousers and a blanket over his shoulders, and walked past the guard posts. Near the railway station his party ran into soldiers who suspected the four farm hands were not what they seemed. Miguel Pro took his companions into a café, sat them down, ordered a large breakfast and talked so steadily that none of the others had to say a word. Watching them eat so calmly, and listening to him, the soldiers dropped their search. On the train he played his companions’ servant, in an enormous sombrero and a Mexican horseman’s suit, carrying their bags, and he walked into Guadalajara that way on September 2.

In Guadalajara he found his mother, Josefa Juárez. Carranza’s forces had stripped his father of his property, and his father had fled for his life. She had come to the city ill and without money, with the four youngest children. Miguel Pro found them in one poor room with two beds and a few chairs. On the wall hung a small picture of the Sacred Heart, the only thing Josefa Juárez had brought from the family’s home in Saltillo. Josefa Juárez told a Mexican Jesuit, a companion of her son: “I am happy to have kept nothing but that and to have left everything for Christ. Nothing now remains but the picture of the Sacred Heart who will bless my house and children!”

At the end of September the railway north to Laredo, on the border with the United States, opened again, and the superiors ordered the young men to cross into the United States. They set the departure for Friday, October 2, the first Friday of the month. At seven in the morning the first group met at the Guadalajara station.

Miguel Pro’s mother came to the platform with his little sister, Ana, and his three brothers, the eldest of them thirteen. Miguel Pro embraced each of them without shedding a tear. Then the train pulled out, and he waved to them from the carriage window. He never saw his mother again. She died in Mexico on February 8, 1926 AD, while he lay ill in Belgium.

The fourteen reached San Antonio, Texas, without trouble, and the Oblate Fathers took them in before they went on to California.

At Los Gatos, Miguel Pro and the other students moved into the novitiate, which was already full of American novices. The Mexican novices were lodged in two small wooden houses a short walk away.

They were to begin with eight days of retreat, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of their order, before going back to their studies. They had almost nothing to study from. Among the fourteen of them there was one Spanish grammar.