CV NEWS FEED // Blessed Miguel Pro was a priest and martyr known for raising his arms in the shape of a cross and shouting “Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long live Christ the King!) just before a firing squad shot him to death, but he is less well known for his humor and his sweet tooth.
Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro Juarez was born into a Catholic family in Guadalupe de Zacatecas, Mexico, on January 13, 1891. As a child, he was known for practical jokes and mischievousness, even leading him to near-death accidents. His older sister joined a cloistered convent and he imitated her devotion by pursuing a vocation to the priesthood.
Pro joined the Jesuits in 1911 but left for Spain to avoid the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico that ramped up in 1914. In 1925, he was finally ordained in Belgium and returned to Mexico to serve the Catholic Church in secret, celebrating Mass and quietly administering sacraments to the hidden Catholics.
His childhood nickname, “Cocol,” after a sweet bread he loved due to his sweet tooth, became his code name during his clandestine ministry.
By night, he would dress as a beggar to secretly baptize babies, bless marriages, and offer Mass. He would bring Holy Communion to Catholics in jail by dressing as a police officer, while in upper-class neighborhoods, he would dress as a businessman. Despite his own lack of resources, he would help find money to take care of impoverished families.
“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,” he once wrote in a letter.
“People give me valuable objects to raffle off, something worth ten pesos that I can sell for forty,” he recounted in the letter. “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.”
When the woman asked him what he was carrying, he told her, “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.
Pro became a wanted man after the Mexican government falsely accused him of attempting to kill the president of Mexico with a bomb. President Plutarco Elías Calles sentenced him to death without any legal recourse, and on November 23, 1927, Pro made his famous proclamation before a firing squad after refusing a blindfold.
“May God have mercy on you! May God bless you! Lord, Thou knowest that I am innocent! With all my heart I forgive my enemies!” he said shortly before he was killed. “Viva Cristo Rey!”
Calles brought a journalist to photograph the killing, hoping to intimidate the public with the pictures. The plan backfired, however, as Pro’s courage was recorded in an image of him imitating Christ.
About 60 years later, Pope St. John Paul II beatified him on September 25, 1988. The Church celebrates his feast day annually on the day of his martyrdom.