Saints Alive! | Bl. Miguel Agustín Pro – My Daily Bread: A Reason2bCatholic blog

Miguel Pro at the moment of his execution when the Mexican soldier and government official drops his scabbard ordering the firing squad and execution.

Feast of Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro

(1891 – 1927)

He was born into a mining family in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. He joined the Jesuits in 1911. Government persecution forced the Jesuits to flee to California in 1914, from where he went to study at Granada in Spain. He left there in 1919 and taught in Nicaragua until 1922. Because of his mining background and his natural ability to get on with people, he was sent to Enghien in Belgium to study Catholic labour movements. After his ordination in 1925 he worked among the miners in Charleroi.

He returned to Mexico in 1926 because it was thought that his health (which was always poor) would improve in the warm climate. At this time the Church was being severely persecuted. Under the Mexican constitution religious education was banned, and priests were forbidden to wear clerical clothes, speak in public, or vote. In some Mexican states all churches had been closed, many priests had been killed, and the few remaining ones had to work underground at the risk of their lives.

Pro celebrated the Eucharist clandestinely and administered the other sacraments to small groups of Catholics. He was arrested once in October 1926, and then in November 1927 he was falsely accused of an assassination attempt on the ex-president and executed without trial. Detailed photographs of his execution were widely published in Mexican newspapers to intimidate Mexican Catholics, but they were treated as holy pictures by the faithful and had the opposite effect. His feast day is celebrated on November 23rd.

Credit: From our friends at Universalis.

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