Miguel Pro

Life and Ministry

Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez was born at Guadalupe in the mining district of Zacatecas, Mexico, on 13 January AD 1891, the son of a mining engineer. After working in his father's mines and showing a marked taste for practical joking that he never quite outgrew, he entered the Society of Jesus at El Llano in AD 1911. Driven into exile by the Mexican Revolution's anti-clerical legislation, he studied philosophy in California, theology in Spain, and was ordained at Enghien in Belgium in AD 1925. He returned to Mexico in July AD 1926, just as President Plutarco Elías Calles was implementing the Calles Law that effectively criminalized public Catholic worship and triggered the Cristero War. For sixteen months Pro conducted an underground ministry in Mexico City — celebrating Mass in private houses, hearing confessions in cabs, distributing food and the sacraments to the families of Cristero fighters in the working-class barrios — disguised variously as a mechanic, a beggar, and a fashionable young man-about-town.

Circumstances of Death

On 13 November AD 1927 a failed assassination attempt on the former president Álvaro Obregón was carried out in Chapultepec Park using a car that had previously belonged to Pro's brother Humberto. Pro and his two brothers Humberto and Roberto were arrested four days later, although no evidence connected Pro himself to the attempt. Without trial, on the personal order of President Calles, Pro was taken to the police firing-range at Calle Balderas on 23 November AD 1927 and shot. Calles had invited the press to photograph the execution as a warning to Cristero sympathizers; the photographs (which Calles believed would discredit Pro) instead became the most-circulated images of the Mexican persecution. Pro refused a blindfold, stretched his arms in the form of a cross at the moment of the volley, and called out: Viva Cristo Rey — Long live Christ the King. (The political dimension of the Cristero conflict was real and complex; Pro, however, was shot without trial and the official charge of complicity in the Obregón attempt was acknowledged in later Mexican scholarship to be unfounded.)

Legacy

Miguel Pro was beatified by John Paul II in AD 1988 and is the most-recognized martyr of the Mexican persecution. The photograph of his arms-outstretched death at Calle Balderas — circulated against Calles's intention — became the icon of the Cristero resistance and one of the most-reproduced martyrdom photographs of the twentieth century. His witness is the witness of the man who lived his last sixteen months in disguise and died with his face uncovered: Christ the King is named at the firing range with the arms open, and the photograph the persecutor took to discredit the priest preached, instead, the priest's last sermon to a country which has not stopped praying it since.