The Martyrdom at the ravine of Agua Caliente

The context

February 1928 in Jalisco

By February 1928, the Cristero War had been going on for sixteen months. The Los Altos region was one of the most active and bloodiest fronts: a week earlier, in San Julián, the Cristeros had just defeated an entire federal column; on Cerro del Cubilete, the federal air force had dynamited the monument to Christ the King; in the Sierra of Nayarit, the Cora and Huichol peoples fought alongside ranchers from Jalisco. In the cities, priests were being executed without trial: in Colima, Guadalajara, Morelia, Chihuahua. In Jalisco an order had been issued that every parish priest knew: any cleric caught celebrating Mass clandestinely would be shot on the spot.

Father Toribio Romo knew all of this. He knew the informer would eventually come. He knew the ravine of Agua Caliente was not an invulnerable hiding place. What he did, during his last days, was prepare.

On Ash Wednesday, February 22, he asked his brother Román to hear his confession and handed him the testamentary letter. On Thursday the 23rd, he sent Román to Aguascalientes on a pretext — he wanted him far away if soldiers came. On Friday the 24th, he sat down to organize the parish registers. He worked all day and all night until shortly before the dawn of Saturday the 25th. When he finished, he felt sleepy. He said to his sister María:

He lay down on the cot in his room. One hour later, the soldiers arrived.

That morning

Five o'clock at dawn

The testimonies agree on the essential facts and differ on some minor details. The version that follows is the one gathered by the postulator of the canonization cause and corroborated by the direct testimony of María Romo González, the priest's sister, who was present. Her account was taken under oath several times between 1928 and her death, decades later.

After the shots

The profanation and the burial

What the soldiers did afterward is documented in several testimonies and constitutes an essential part of the canonization process, because it demonstrates the odium fidei — hatred of the faith — that the Church requires to recognize someone as a martyr.

The soldiers did not permit María to watch over the body. They tied her back-to-back with her brother's corpse, using the priest's own clothes. They assembled an improvised stretcher of branches and sticks. They stripped Father Toribio of his vestments and ransacked the house: they took the chalice, the liturgical ornaments, the parish registers Toribio had finished organizing only hours earlier.

They transported the body on foot to the hamlet of La Quemada, passing in front of the municipal offices of Tequila. The soldiers whistled and sang obscenities while forced neighbors carried the stretcher. The other mourners prayed in low voices. At La Quemada, they held María prisoner for several hours without explanation.

When she was released, María walked barefoot all the way to Guadalajara, to her parents' house, to isolate herself from hatred, to take shelter in her parents' love, and to weep with her family for the loss of her «dear little one» — as the family called him. The Plascencia family, close to the Romos in Guadalajara, obtained permission from civil authorities to hold a wake at their house. The next day, Sunday, February 26, 1928, amid a silent crowd that prayed and wept, and under federal surveillance, Father Toribio was buried in the municipal cemetery of Guadalajara.

The testamentary letter

After a few days, Román Romo — the younger brother, himself now a fugitive — opened the letter Toribio had handed him on Ash Wednesday. It was a brief, plainspoken testament, without grandiosity. Its text is known because Román transcribed it later:

These are the last known words from his own hand. What moves the reader of this document is not the theological grandeur — there is none — but the concrete humanity: worry for the elderly parents, gratitude to the sister, two pending Masses, three pesos and fifty cents he did not want to owe the priest of another town. A saint is not always a titan. Sometimes he is a man who does not want to die in debt.

What followed

From grave to altar

For twenty years, the body of Father Toribio Romo rested in the municipal cemetery of Guadalajara. Little by little, during those years, close friends of the family brought back to the village of Santa Ana the relics they had carefully kept: the clothes Toribio wore at death, still bearing visible bloodstains; the scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel found beside his body; his personal Bible; drops of blood carefully gathered in cotton wool and later preserved in small glass vials. These objects are kept today in side urns of the Iglesia de la Mesita, available to pilgrims who wish to see them.

In 1948, his brother Román — who had survived the war and spent the following years gathering testimonies, writing the biography, promoting private devotion — obtained episcopal permission for the translation. The remains returned to Santa Ana de Guadalupe and were placed in the chapel Toribio himself had helped to build for the Virgin of Guadalupe, where he had celebrated his first Mass in 1923.

The small chapel became known from then on as the Iglesia de la Mesita, because it stands on a small elevated plateau. There the martyr's relics were venerated for decades. Almost immediately, miracles began to be attributed to his intercession. Román and other relatives recorded testimonies in small notebooks treasured for decades in the hope they would serve for the canonization. Devotion remained strictly local: families from Santa Ana, San Miguel el Alto, Jalostotitlán. In 1990 the notebooks held only a few dozen entries.

Then, in 1992, beatification came, and everything changed.

The migrant phenomenon, which transformed a local cult into transnational devotion, is the subject of Chapters III and IV. →