Toribio Romo González

Life and Ministry

Toribio Romo González was born at Santa Ana de Guadalupe, Jalisco, in AD 1900, the son of poor mestizo farmers, entered the auxiliary seminary at San Juan de los Lagos at twelve, and was ordained priest at Guadalajara in AD 1922. He served in the parishes of Sayula and Tuxpan and was appointed vicar of Santa Ana de Tequila in AD 1927, just as the Calles administration's anti-clerical Calles Law reached the height of its enforcement. He continued his sacramental ministry in concealment from a converted brewery at Agua Caliente, baptizing infants, hearing confessions, marrying Cristero soldiers and their fiancées, and saying Mass at night for the dispersed Catholic congregations of the Tequila district, knowing that priestly ministry was now punishable by death under federal Mexican law.

Circumstances of Death

In the small hours of 25 February AD 1928, federal troops under the command of a Captain Quintanar surrounded the brewery at Agua Caliente where Father Romo was sleeping on his cot after a night of confessions. The soldiers burst into his room and shot him before he was fully awake. He fell at the feet of his sister María, who had been keeping vigil; she was forbidden to touch the body, which was dragged out into the Tequila parish hall and put on public display as a warning to the Cristero villagers. His last recorded words, to his sister as the soldiers entered, were a simple Padre nuestro begun and not finished. He was twenty-seven years old.

Legacy

Toribio Romo was beatified in AD 1992 and canonized by Pope John Paul II among the Saints of the Mexican Cristero Persecution on 21 May AD 2000. He has become, since the AD 1990s, the object of a remarkable popular devotion among Mexican-American immigrants crossing the Sonoran desert, who report his visible appearance and material aid in their accounts. His witness is that the priest in hiding stays at his altar: the night-time Mass at Agua Caliente was a fugitive Mass, but it was the same Mass and the same Lord, and the priest who died beside his cot died at his post.