Blessed Miguel Pro is one of my “core saints,” a mystical friend to whom I feel a deeply personal connection despite the vast separations of time, experience, language, and culture between us. I think of him often, especially when perseverance in faith feels grueling. He has made me laugh out loud, swell with inspiration, and overflow in tears at the beautiful mystery of life and death and the hope of Heaven.
Born in 1891, José Ramón Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez grew up in a large Catholic family in Mexico. Even as a child, Miguel displayed sharp wit and a sense of adventure and mischief. He once ran up a tab at the local candy shop, charging purchases to his parents’ account (one they had not set up). He got away with it until the month ended and his parents received the bill. He once decapitated his sister’s dolls, and upon being reprimanded, said the dolls had been guilty of treason and so he had no other choice.
A friend later recalled that there were “two Miguels”: the playful one and the prayerful one. From the earliest age, Miguel had a sincere faith, nurtured by his family, that ultimately became a vocation to the priesthood. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1911, but the Jesuits soon evacuated their seminarians when the Mexican Revolution erupted and the new government enacted an aggressive persecution against Catholics. Padre Pro was ordained in 1925 in Belgium and returned on assignment to Mexico the next year.
His priestly ministry occurred almost entirely underground. Priests faced active pursuit as enemies of the state, but Miguel cheerfully accepted the danger so he could bring sacraments to the faithful. And somehow, he even managed to have fun while dodging arrest and persecution. He relished the chance to do things like wear disguises as he evaded the police.
You can hear both his humor and deep trust in God in one of his letters from that period:
"We carry on like slaves. Jesus help me! There isn’t time to breathe, and I am up to my eyebrows in this business of feeding those who have nothing. And they are many—those with nothing. I assure you that I spin like a top from here to there with such luck as is the exclusive privilege of petty thieves. It doesn’t even faze me to receive such messages as: ‘The X Family reports that they are twelve members and their pantry is empty. Their clothing is falling off them in pieces, three are sick in bed and there isn’t even water.’ As a rule my purse is as dry as Calles’s soul, but it isn’t worth worrying since the Procurator of Heaven is generous.
People give me valuable objects to raffle off, something worth ten pesos that I can sell for forty. Once I was walking along with a woman’s purse that was quite cute (the purse not the woman) when I met a wealthy woman all dolled up.
‘What do you have there?’
‘A lady’s purse worth twenty-five pesos. You can have it for fifty pesos which I beg you to send to such-and-such a family.’
I see God’s hand so palpably in everything that almost—almost I fear they won’t kill me in these adventures. That will be a fiasco for me who sighs to go to heaven and start tossing off arpeggios on the guitar with my guardian angel.”
After numerous close calls and escapes, Miguel Pro was arrested on false charges and immediately sentenced to execution without a trial. The Mexican president personally directed Miguel’s execution and ordered that it be photographed for propaganda.
Miguel Pro walked out from his cell to meet a firing squad on November 23, 1927. He gave the soldiers a blessing and publicly forgave his enemies, then knelt and prayed. When he stood up to face the guns, refusing a customary blindfold, he held out his arms like a crucifix—a rosary in his left hand and cross in his right. As bullets rained down on his outstretched arms, Miguel Pro shouted, “Viva Cristo Rey!”—long live Christ the King!
The execution photos ran on the front pages of every newspaper, intended as a warning to the underground Church. But it didn’t work. Instead of fear, the photos unleashed courage. Public worship was forbidden, but 40,000 people joined Padre Pro’s funeral Mass procession through the streets. His martyrdom ushered in the end of the persecution.
We have an unfathomable treasure given by the One who knows and loves us most: the fullness of truth. In a universe that for millennia has ached with the search, it is an impossible joy to know the one true answer to the only true question.
Yet sometimes practicing the Faith in our own culture feels precarious. You can feel the fury of hearts left empty by false idols and false satisfactions and foundations of sand. And we are often so afraid of what we will lose—reputations, jobs, esteem, approval, affections—that we become misers. We keep Church teaching to ourselves like an embarrassment. We keep the clear, bold truth hidden from a world suffocating in license and confusion.
Miguel Pro shows us how to persevere, to be generous and bold with the treasure of truth, to lavish it upon those starving and thirsty: “Does our life become from day to day more painful, more oppressive, more replete with sufferings? Blessed be He a thousand times who desires it so. If life be harder, love makes it also stronger, and only this love, grounded on suffering, can carry the Cross of my Lord, Jesus Christ.”
Miguel Pro’s feast is November 23.
Books about Blessed Miguel Pro
Blessed Miguel Pro, 20th Century Mexican Martyr (this is where I read the stories of the candy shop and the dolls)
You can also watch this documentary on YouTube (it's not the most compelling, in my opinion, but it gives a full summary of Miguel Pro's story).
Such a marvelous and relevant reflection, Aimee. You describe him as one we would have all been friends with and loved. His courage amidst the suffering somehow reminds me of the main character in the film Life is Beautiful, although here we are all his sons.