St. José Sánchez del Río, modern child martyr

At the beginning of the 20^th century there was a conflict in Mexico that lasted from 1926 to 1929. As a part of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, the government attempted to make Mexico more secular—in the face of its deeply Catholic roots. The government seized church property, closed Catholic schools, and killed Catholic priests. At first, a peaceful resistance arose, but it soon escalated into a series of violent uprisings and sparked what came to be known as the Cristero War, a kind of civil war of Catholic Christian rebels against the secular government.

Born in March of 1913, José Sánchez del Río was a young teenager when the war broke out. When it did, he wanted to participate in the defense of Christianity, but his mother held him back even though his brothers had all joined the war effort. He eventually persuaded both her and the rebel general, Prudencio Mendoza Alcazar, to accept his enlistment on the basis that he was eager to give his life to Christ—in other words, to die defending the faith.

José was originally enlisted as a flag-bearer, but ended up being martyred anyway. During one of the battles, a fellow soldier’s horse was killed, and José gave him his own horse so that he could escape. José remained behind, firing at the enemy until he ran out of ammunition, and was then captured and imprisoned.

While in confinement, José was ordered to renounce his faith, but he refused. The soldiers attempted to pressure him, first by making him watch the hanging of another rebel. Like many of the martyrs of the past, instead of despairing or being horrified, José implored the man to meet death with courage and told him that they would meet in heaven. The soldiers later tortured him by cutting off the bottoms of his feet and forcing him to walk around town, as well as by cutting him with machetes so that he bled profusely. All the while they told him that if he said “death to Christ,” he would be set free, but he refused, instead shouting, “Viva Cristo Rey!”. In English, this phrase means “long live Christ the king.” After some time in captivity, he was shot by his captors and died at the age of fourteen.

Who persecutes whom?

St. Jose is a patron of persecuted Christians, children, adolescents, and the city of Sahuayo. His feast day is celebrated in the Catholic church on the day of his death, February 10^th.

The death of Saint José del Río is a good counterexample to certain common narratives about the Catholic church. Modern people often have the vague idea that there was a period of time called the “dark ages” in which Christianity ruled the Western world through oppressive, totalitarian dictatorship (you can see this idea dramatized in fictional works such as Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta). Such beliefs are usually accompanied by imagery of shadowy inquisitors torturing anyone who was found practicing science or doing anything resembling free-thinking.

However, these notions are typically the mythologies of modern pop culture—at best, they are gross misunderstandings of practices that were widely accepted in medieval and early modern society. In truth, it was medieval Catholic and Byzantine culture that invented the university system, pioneered modern science, and gave birth to the Renaissance. Further, for much of the history of Western civilization, it was actually secular society that tortured and killed Christians, not the other way around. There are countless examples of such persecution: from the many anti-Catholic movements across modern secular Europe to the atheist Soviet Union’s attempted genocide of Orthodox Christians, secular governments hold the record on the violent bloody oppression of Christians. The life of St. José is a good example of a conflict in which the secular state was eager to use violence and torture to destroy any rivals to its power—namely, religion.