Postscripts From The Catholic Spitfire Grill

I’ve been picking on Reformation-era England with my category “Catholic Martyrs of Protestant England’s Reign of Religious Tolerance” because I heard once too many times how much more tolerant those Protestants were than those heinous Catholics. (Again let me state for the record that I don’t believe that Catholics should have killed for their faith EITHER.) But you know what? There seems to be a blindspot in the historical records in general with respect to the persecution of Catholics in general. I studied both the French and Mexican Revolutions in elementary school, in junior high, high school and college and the systematic persecution of Catholics must have slipped the minds of the authors of my history books. Growing up as a Protestant I knew about Dietrich Bonhoffer and the Ten Boom family but heard how the Catholic Church cooperated with the Nazis. There was no mention of Maximilian Kolbe or the barracks and barracks of priests who were interned in Dachau and other concentration camps. I didn’t know about the priests and nuns in Spain who were dragged into the streets and summarily shot in more than one country in Europe. I didn’t know about the Japanese Catholics that were crucified with their priests crucified with them. I didn’t know about the Catholic martyrs in Vietnam and other places. And so I would like to introduce you to some of these martyrs in places close to us in time and in histories that perhaps you didn’t know as well as you thought. Starting with…. 

Blessed José Trinidad Trinidad Rangel Montano, priest and martyr (1887-1927) of Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico, was ordained a priest at the age of thirty-one. The years of his priestly ministry were characterized by humility, simplicity, and zeal for sould. Early in 1927 the anti-Catholic regime governing Mexico forced Father Rangel out of his parish on the pretext that he had failed to report his priestly identity to the, He found refuge in the Catholic home of Josefina Alba and her sister Jovita, who were sheltering another priest in hiding, (Blessed) Andres Sola y Molist. The two priests encouraged each other. Turning down the suggestion of his brother that he should escape to the United States, Father Rangel accepted an invitation to celebrate the liturgical rites of Holy Week secretly in a friary of the Minim congregation. The holy days gave him the opportunity to administer the sacraments, particularly to hospital patients. On April 22, 1927, Father Rangel was found and arrested. Resolutely unwilling to deny his priestly identity even under torture, he was shot to death on April 25.

I highly recommend subscribing to Magnificat, I am only picking out an occasional one of these.