Miguel Pro Juárez

Miguel Pro Juárez (born Jan. 13, 1891, Guadalupe, Zacatecas, Mex.—died Nov. 23, 1927, Mexico City) was a Mexican Jesuit priest martyred during anti-Roman Catholic persecutions of the 1920s in Mexico.

The son of a socially prominent family, Pro entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1911. Because of government persecutions, he fled to California (1914–15) and then to Spain (1915–19) and taught in Nicaragua from 1919 to 1922. He returned to Spain and then studied in Enghien, Belg., where he was ordained in 1925. In 1926 he returned to Mexico, even though Roman Catholicism was virtually proscribed there. Militant Catholics had arisen in several states in the so-called Cristero Rebellion, attacking government buildings, burning schools, and assassinating officials. In reprisal, the government executed members of the clergy, burned churches, and massacred Cristeros and their sympathizers. Father Pro was shot by a firing squad after being suspected of involvement in an assassination attempt against former president Álvaro Obregón. (An automobile used in the plot was linked to Pro’s brother.) Pro’s execution was ordered, without trial or appeal, by the then president of Mexico, General Plutarco Elías Calles, the founder of what became the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Pro was beatified on Sept. 25, 1988.