Blessed Miguel Pro

Blessed Miguel was born in the state of Zacatecas on January 13, 1891 AD, the eldest son of a mine owner. For a little over five years he worked in his father's mine office, where he could type a hundred words a minute. In his free hours he went down the pit to talk with the miners, and he learned their slang and never lost it.

When two of his sisters entered a convent, he blamed the Jesuits who guided them and swore never to forgive them. He ran off to the hills until his mother found him and talked him into making a retreat. He came home set on becoming a Jesuit, and in August 1911 AD he entered the novitiate at El Llano.

In August 1914 AD armed soldiers of Carranza's revolutionary army came to the novitiate by night, and the novices scattered in lay dress. Dressed as a farm labourer, Blessed Miguel slipped past the guard posts out of Zamora. His father had been stripped of his property, and his mother, Josefa Juárez, had fled ill and penniless to Guadalajara.

In Guadalajara, after a solemn Mass for the exiles, he left by train with the first group of Jesuit students bound for California. At the station he embraced his mother without shedding a tear. He never saw her again.

Exiled from Mexico, Blessed Miguel continued his training in California, Spain, Nicaragua and Belgium. In the influenza of 1919 AD he nursed the sick in his community day and night for fifteen days, until he fell ill himself. A stomach illness that began at El Llano stayed with him, and he hid it behind his cheerfulness.

At the end of August 1925 AD he was ordained a priest at Enghien, in Belgium. His mother was not there, and when the other new priests embraced their families he went to the sacristy and wept.

In November 1925 AD Father Pro left Enghien for surgery on his stomach. There were three operations, and the second was done without chloroform. His mother died in Mexico on February 8, 1926 AD, while he was still ill in Belgium.

In the summer of 1926 AD his superiors called him home to Mexico. He sailed home on the liner Cuba, the only priest among its 525 passengers.

A new law took effect on July 31, 1926 AD, and Mexico's bishops answered by suspending all public worship that needed a priest. In the last days before, Father Pro heard confessions from 5:30 in the morning to 11 and from 3 to 8 at night, and twice he was carried out in a faint. He said his last public Mass on July 31, the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

With the churches shut, he set up Communion stations around the city, where he gave about three hundred Communions a day. He moved about in disguise; once, dressed as a mechanic, he preached a retreat to some twenty chauffeurs. He also fed poor families, among them those of persecuted Catholics, and begged for the food himself.

In November 1927 AD a bomb was thrown at the car of General Álvaro Obregón, the president-elect, in the Chapultepec woods, and he escaped. Before dawn on November 18 police burst in on Father Pro and his brothers Humberto and Roberto. Father Pro heard Humberto's confession in a corner of the room before they were taken.

General Roberto Cruz, the police chief, told the press that the prisoners had confessed to the plot. All three brothers swore they had no part in it, and Cruz's secretary told a lawyer there was no proof against them. Pope St. John Paul II's apostolic letter records that Father Pro was unjustly accused and condemned to death by President Calles without ever being brought to trial.

That morning the papers carried the police chief's announcement that the prisoners would be tried that day. At about 10:20 a gendarme came down to the cells and called Father Pro's name. In the yard, before soldiers, officials and press photographers, Major Torres, the officer of the firing squad, asked his last wish, and Father Pro asked to pray.

He knelt and kissed his crucifix, then refused the blindfold and stood against the stockade with his arms stretched out like a cross. At the command to fire he cried out *Viva Cristo Rey* (*Long live Christ the King*), and fell. Further volleys killed Humberto and the two other condemned men. A reprieve won from Calles came too late for them, but it spared Roberto at the last moment.

His father received the body and kissed his son's forehead without a tear. Thousands of workers and soldiers filed past the coffin at the family house. On November 24, 1927 AD, the funeral procession was so long that its rear had not reached the Dolores cemetery four hours after its head arrived.

A decree of November 10, 1986 AD recognised his death as a true martyrdom. Pope St. John Paul II beatified him in St. Peter's Square on September 25, 1988 AD, and set his feast on November 23, the day of his death. The next day the Pope told the Mexican pilgrims that their Church had a new intercessor in heaven.