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THREE MINUTES WITH THE SAINTS
Blessed Miguel Pro: The Heroic and Selfless Martyr of the Cristero War
“Viva Christo Rey!”
In this week’s installment of “Three Minutes With the Saints” we meet a man from a turbulent and largely forgotten period of Mexico’s modern history. Today, Mexico is known as one of the most Catholic countries in the world, and for much of the past 500 years that has been true. Following the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego near Mexico City in 1531, nearly the entire country converted to Christianity; today there are over 100 million Catholics in Mexico, making it the second-largest Catholic country after Brazil.
But events in the early part of the 20th century could have resulted in a far different situation. In 1926, Mexican President Plutarch Elias Calles introduced a set of anti-Catholic laws intended to eradicate both the influence of the Catholic Church in Mexico and to stop all religious celebrations in the local communities. The people saw this as an attempt to impose a state-sponsored atheism in the country, much like what had happened in Russia a decade before.
The people rose up against these laws, and between 1926 and 1929 fought what became known as the Cristero War. Before it ended in 1929 with the government agreeing to recognize the…
