Canonization of Saint Toribio Romo

Sixty years of official silence

After the martyrdom of February 1928, the memory of Father Toribio Romo remained, for several decades, confined to the family and rancho scale. There were reasons of political order: the Accords of 1929 between the federal government and the episcopal hierarchy, negotiated by US Ambassador Dwight Morrow, had suspended the armed conflict but not resolved its causes. The Mexican Church entered a long period of prudence. To publicly exalt the recent martyrs could reopen wounds that both sides preferred to leave closed.

During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, devotion to the Cristero martyrs was maintained in the villages, in families, in intimate correspondence, but it was not promoted from the episcopate with the same intensity with which the martyrs of the Spanish Civil War were canonized — a process that advanced more quickly in Rome. Mexico, in this sense, was slow and deliberate.

Father Román Romo, the martyr's brother, devoted four decades to quiet preservation: he gathered testimonies from eyewitnesses while they still lived, organized the biographical data, secured the translation of the remains to the Santa Ana shrine in 1948, built the Iglesia de la Mesita, and maintained active correspondence with families from Los Altos who had settled in the United States, so that the memory would not be lost. He died in 1981, eleven years before the work bore fruit.

The cause reopens

By the late 1980s, the ecclesial climate changed. John Paul II had visited Mexico in 1979, on his first apostolic trip as pope — a gesture with enormous symbolic weight in a country where Catholic worship was still legally restricted. By 1988, the Salinas constitutional reforms that would restore diplomatic relations between Mexico and the Holy See and recognize the legal personality of churches were on the horizon; they would be enacted in 1992.

In that context, the Mexican Episcopal Conference renewed the canonization causes of the Cristero martyrs with renewed vigor. They were grouped into a collective process led by the figure of Cristóbal Magallanes Jara, parish priest of Totatiche, Jalisco, executed on May 25, 1927, three months before Father Toribio's death. With Magallanes, 24 companions — priests and laypeople — martyred between 1915 and 1937 for reasons of the same conflict, were included.

Father Toribio Romo González was one of those companions. His diocesan process was formalized in the Archdiocese of Guadalajara and advanced quickly thanks to the abundance of direct witnesses still living — María Romo had died, but testimonies taken under oath remained, and second-generation family members still remembered the neighbors of Tequila. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints examined the dossier in Rome during 1990 and 1991. The miracle approved for beatification — the first step toward canonization — was the inexplicable cure of an ill woman in Jalostotitlán, documented and verified by the Vatican medical commission.

Beatification · November 22, 1992

John Paul II beatified the group of Cristóbal Magallanes and 24 companions at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome on November 22, 1992. Saint Toribio Romo entered the group as one of the twenty-five. It was the first time in history that the Vatican beatified such a large number of Mexican Cristero martyrs in a single act. The ceremony marked, symbolically, the end of the long episcopal prudence and the opening of a new phase of public recognition.

The canonization in Saint Peter's Square

Eight years after beatification — a relatively short interval for the usual rhythm of these processes in Rome — John Paul II canonized the entire group of Cristóbal Magallanes and companions on Sunday, May 21, 2000, at Saint Peter's Square. It was the Jubilee Holy Year. The ceremony was enormous. Representatives of the martyrs' families attended, the Mexican bishops in full, pilgrims from Jalisco, Zacatecas, Michoacán, and from Mexican communities in the United States.

The second miracle required for canonization — apart from that of the 1992 beatification — was approved as a collective miracle attributed to the intercession of the group. The complete list of the twenty-five martyrs canonized that day includes:

The 25 Cristero Martyrs

It is worth noting that the list also includes Justino Orona Madrigal, the parish priest of Cuquío under whose guidance Father Toribio worked between 1925 and 1927. The two friends, master and disciple, were canonized on the same day, in the same ceremony. Orona was killed on July 1, 1928, four months after Toribio, in the same state of Jalisco.

John Paul II's homily placed the 25 martyrs within the Jubilee of 2000 as privileged witnesses of the priesthood and of fidelity to the Gospel in times of persecution. The pope emphasized two features common to all of them: their predominantly priestly state — 22 of the 25 were diocesan priests — and their closeness to the poor and peasants they served. None was a bishop. None had national fame during his lifetime. All died young or mature but unknown outside their immediate region. It was, in the pope's own words, a canonization of country priests.

What changed · what did not

The canonization of 2000 profoundly modified the scale of the cult of Saint Toribio Romo. In the years immediately after, the number of pilgrims to the shrine at Santa Ana de Guadalupe multiplied: from tens of thousands annually in the 1990s to hundreds of thousands in the first decade of the 21st century, and to one million annually by 2015. The American press — The New York Times in 2002, Dallas Morning News in 2006, Los Angeles Times in 2014 — discovered the phenomenon and spread it among non-Catholic and non-Mexican audiences.

The liturgical date of May 21 — common memorial of the group — was incorporated into the universal Catholic calendar as an optional memorial, meaning it can be celebrated in any diocese worldwide. In Mexican dioceses it is a mandatory memorial. In numerous US dioceses with a high proportion of Mexican faithful, it has been elevated to a local feast, and several parishes in California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Illinois, and New York now bear the title of Saint Toribio Romo.

What did not change: the Catholic Church has not officially proclaimed Saint Toribio Romo as the patron of migrants. That title — the one appearing on holy cards, pamphlets, popular prayers, and journalistic language — is of popular attribution, not canonical. The official patronage of migrants belongs to other saints, including Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini and Our Lady of Guadalupe. The fact that Saint Toribio holds that place de facto in the transnational Mexican devotion is a classic case of de facto patronage arising from the grassroots — a phenomenon recognized and respected by the hierarchy, even when not formally proclaimed.