The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
A new shrine in Chicago for Mexican martyrs
In leafy 61st Avenue in Cicero, now a suburb of Chicago, hydrangeas and geraniums thrive beside the lawn at number 2400. Number 2400 is the church of Our Lady of the Mount. Of its six Masses on a Sunday, five are said in Spanish.
It’s a long way (1,500 miles) to the Mexican border, but over the past 40 years there has been a lot of Hispanic settlement in Cicero. Two years ago, the church installed in a new altar relics of three Mexicans killed in the 1920s but canonised in recent years.
One, St José Luis Sánchez del Río, was declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2016. He died before his 15th birthday. José Luis had volunteered in the so-called Cristero war, serving as a flag bearer. He was captured by government troops, who brutally urged him to deny Christ. Taken to a place of execution he was asked if he had a message for his family. “Tell them that we will see each other in heaven,” he replied and was shot, on February 10 1928.
Many people seem unfamiliar with the persecution of Christians in Mexico in the first half of the 20th century. It is glimpsed obliquely in Graham Greene’s The Power and the
Glory (1940). The violent height of the persecution is sketched in Greene’s earlier non-fiction book The Lawless Roads and in
Robbery under Law, a study made by Evelyn Waugh after visiting Mexico in the 1930s.
The violence stemmed from the constitution imposed in 1917, sometimes called anticlerical, though its effect was felt mostly by lay people, who could no longer have their children educated in church schools. Any expression of religion outside church buildings was banned, though Mexican piety was keen on processions. Thousands of priests were exiled, imprisoned or killed.
Plutarco Elías Calles ramped up action against the Church during his presidency, 1924-28, and then for another five years as Jefe Máximo. In 1926 he had passed laws enforcing the Constitution of 1917 and Church property was confiscated. In response the Cristero war began with rural uprisings. “Cristero” was the nickname for the rebels, whose battle cry was
“Long live Christ the King”. Pope Pius XI had instituted the feast of Christ the King in 1925.
Before 1926 was out, the Pope, who later issued an encyclical letter in German against Nazism, published an encyclical against the Mexican persecution.
His predecessor, the pacific Pope Benedict XV, had in 1920 canonised St Joan of Arc, 489 years after her execution. In 1927, a women’s movement called the Brigadas Femeninas de Santa Juana de Arco spread in Mexico to nurse wounded Cristeros and support their fight.
The United States, largely motivated by oil, armed the Mexican government. A peace was negotiated in
1929 by the American ambassador, Dwight Morrow. Perhaps 90,000 or 100,000 had died in the war and the peace was flawed, leaving anti-Catholic legislation in place if less systematically enforced.
This is not just of historical interest. Pope John Paul II canonised 25 of the martyrs in 2000. In 2005 another dozen were beatified (the step before canonisation) . Lively devotion to the martyrs continues, as in Cicero.
One of the martyrs venerated there is St Toribio Romo. His prayers are invoked by Mexican migrants trying to enter the United States. This is curious, for Romo had written a one-act comedy Vamos al Norte! (Let’s Go North!) on the dangers of life in America. But he was shot in his bed at Tequila in Jalisco state on February 26 1928, aged 27.