“We Should Not Ask for the Persecution to End”

Remember, Tertullian said in his Apologeticus, "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church". Much seed is being sown these days!

From One Peter Five

By Theresa Marie Moreau

"...that there be a hero in every Catholic, as in the time of Nero."

Two evils, greed and faction, are the destruction of all justice.

Thomas More (1478-1535)

An ancient tree of great renown – considered a relic by Revolutionaries – stood proudly in the town of Colima.

For at the base of that Zalate tree – a gnarled, twisted rock fig – the newly enthroned Mexican President Benito Pablo Juárez Garcia (1806-72) once rested in its shade, as he sat upon a stone, accompanied by members of his cabinet, on March 25, 1858.

The famous Zalate tree of Colima

Subsequently, that rock fig was no longer just any tree. It was a tree of exceptional repute and would be bestowed with great distinction, even honored with the name “Zalate of Juarez,” after the subversive Revolutionary who once paused below its branches.

And Juárez was not just any president. He was Mexico’s first indigenous Zapotec to hold that office. Orphaned at the age of three, he toiled barefoot in the cornfields until the age of twelve, when he was hired, in 1818, as a domestic to work in the home of Antonio Salanueva – a bookbinder and tertiary Franciscan, of the Orders of Friars Minor.

Salanueva tutored Juárez, an illiterate who spoke only his native tongue, a dialect of Zapotec, an indigenous Mesoamerican language. The lay Franciscan devoted a great deal of his time to teach the youth not only how to speak Spanish, but also how to read and write the imported Romance language. Seeing potential in Juarez as a priest, Salanueva, personally, secured for his hired help a spot in the Seminario Pontifico de la Santa Cruz de Oaxaca, which the teenager entered in the spring of 1821.

For six years Juárez studied at the seminary. But he had no priestly vocation. Instead, in 1827, he entered the Instituto de Ciencias and Artes de Oaxaca, where he pursued a law degree, which he obtained, in 1832.

Soon after he began his law career, he represented indigenous villagers from Loxicha, Oaxaca. But the fledgling attorney lost the case filed against a member of the clergy. As a result, he grew embittered and resentful against the Church, her clergy and faithful – which had helped him achieve a career and comfort in life. Thereafter, the diminutive anti-Catholic fanatic – who stood only 4 feet 6 inches tall – dove into the world of politics and relentlessly attacked the Church.

Through the decades, he clawed his way up the ladder, rung by rung, as a member of the Liberal Party, whose color red, was often worn by its guerrilla fighters. That anti-Catholic political party, active from 1822 to 1911, was strongly influenced by the French Revolution (1789-99), which wreaked hell upon its own people for ten years, with a resultant societal decline still felt inside its borders to this day. With a feel-good slogan of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” that catered to the commoners in the Third Estate (98 percent of the entire population), the violent, chaotic, social and political upheaval in France also introduced Socialism to the world and caused more than 100 million deaths around the globe.

After Mexico’s Revolution of Ayutla (1854-55), control of the nation was wrestled from conservative President Antonio de Padua Maria Severino Lopez de Santa Anna y Perez de Lebron (1794-1876), making way for The Reform (1856-57), a political and social revolution that stripped the Catholic Church of property and of rights, a result of anti-clerical laws that Juárez was instrumental in passing.

During the subsequent Reform War (1857-61) – a battle between conservatives and socialists – Juárez was promoted to the presidency, on January 21, 1858. Shortly thereafter, the president and his cabinet hunkered down in Guadalajara, where soldiers in the garrison imprisoned them, in March 1858. But soon released, they made their way to Manzanillo. It was on that journey, when, on March 28, Juárez and his cabinet rested under the Zalate tree.

Juárez – who would become renowned as the Father of Modern Mexico and the Meritorious of the Americas – remained president until his death, on July 18, 1872.

But his namesake, the Zalate of Juarez, continued to thrive, offering shade under its leafy canopy to every passersby in its long and estimable life. However, Juárez was not the only one to bring importance to that gnarled, twisted rock fig of fame. Almost 70 years later, an 18-year-old Colima native spent his last moments under the leaves of that glorious ficus.

A devout Catholic, Tomas de la Mora (1909-27) was a cheerful, festive, playful teenager, but he was also a thoughtful young man, who preoccupied himself with thoughts of the Church and her faithful, persecuted ever since Juárez and the subsequent Socialist dictators unleashed their hatred of everything Catholic.

Asking for prayers, Tomas wrote, on May 31, 1926, to his sister Lupe, living in Mexico City:

You, who are next to the Blessed Sacrament, ask Him to give all Mexican Catholics courage so that we do not falter. We should not ask for the persecution to end, but rather that there be a hero in every Catholic, as in the time of Nero.

A few months later, he wrote another letter to Lupe:

How many memories of our late grandfather have been saddened, remembering the days we spent in his little ranch, so joyful and recreational when it was cared for by its elderly owner!

No wonder the saints despise everything earthly. For the joys of today will be tomorrow’s piercing memories that will tell the soul: ‘Unhappy man, you thought you would always enjoy us. But no. You will soon die. It is necessary, then, to look carefully into eternity.’

It will be said: This one, what is he worrying about?

He prays to God that he may be a martyr.

The Cristero War erupted soon after Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles (born Francisco Plutarco Elias Campuzano, 1877-1945) signed into legislation the anti-Catholic Law Reforming the Penal Code, on June 14, 1926.

Doing his part in the fight against tyranny, Tomas worked with the Feminine Brigades of Saint Joan of Arc, providing the Catholic guerrilla soldiers in the National Guard – the paramilitary branch of the Liberation Movement – with clothing, medicine, ammunition, information. And all throughout his work, he continued to be preoccupied with his soul, eternity, martyrdom.

At one point, he spoke with Father Enrique de Jesús Ochoa Santana (1899-1977), chaplain of the Cristeros and brother of General Dionisio Eduardo Ochoa Santana (1900-27), head of the Colima region who would die an untimely death, on November 12, 1927, after an accidental explosion while manufacturing homemade grenades.

“Martyrs are holy, aren’t they?” Tomas asked.

“Yes,” Ochoa answered.

“What if they kill us for Christ, will we be martyrs?”

“He who gives his life for the sake of Jesus Christ is a martyr.”

“When they hang us for the sake of Jesus Christ the King, then we will be martyrs. Then we will be saints,” Tomas commented, assured of his fate.

On Saturday, August 27, 1927, while at home playing with his younger brothers, an escort of ten Callista soldiers barged into the house and arrested him.

“Don’t grieve, Mama,” he said to his highly distressed mother. “Give me your blessing, and if we don’t see each other again in this life, we’ll see each other in heaven.”

Perfectly calm, he kneeled before his mother, who blessed him, before he was hauled away and transported to the former diocesan seminary, in Colima, converted into the local Military Headquarters, with barracks and prison, where he was presented to the head of the military facility, General Flores, reputed as cruel and wicked.

“You’re in correspondence with the Catholics who have taken up arms.” Flores said. “Here’s the letter. The letter and signature are yours.”

“It’s mine,” Tomas admitted.

“You’re just a child. You’re not capable of anything. Tell us: Who is the one who advises you?”

“Don’t call me a child, because I know very well what I’m doing. No one advises me.”

After ordering that the teen be tortured, Flores approached the teen and demanded: “Look. Tell me everything you know about those Cristeros, and I’ll let you go.”

“It’s useless, General. I will say nothing. And if you give me freedom, tomorrow I will go to the volcano to join the Cristeros in the struggle for Christ the King. I’ll communicate with them and tell them what’s wrong. I accept death.”

“You’re just a child. You don’t know what death is.”

“Well, in that, General, we’re the same, because you don’t know what death is either, because you’ve never died. But I will gladly die, for I die for Christ the King.”

“Don’t waste time, boy.”

“General. I told you I won’t say anything. I’m ready to suffer death, rather than be a traitor to the cause of those who fight for Christ.”

“Hang him. Tonight,” the general ordered his men.

But first, Tomas had a simple request:

“All right, General. Only give me an hour to prepare to die, and allow me to choose the place of my execution.”

Around midnight, soldiers of the Federal and Permanent National Army – with orders to hang him wherever he wished – pulled the teen from his cell. Outside, the military escort took a route through a tree-lined street, now named Calle Emilio Carranza.

There, Tomas found his hanging tree. Not just any tree. It was the Zalate of Juárez, under which once sat Juarez, the former president who persecuted Catholics.

“This is a place of ignominy. Hang me here, so that this place of curse may be changed into a blessing.”

The soldiers prepared the rope, tossed one end over a branch.

“Put it on,” ordered a soldier, holding out the noose.

“I don’t know how to put it on. It’s the first time I’ve been hanged. Tell me how.”

Around Tomas’ neck the loop tightened, and with one yank after another, the soldiers lifted him into the air.

As best he could, he cheered, “Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Santa Maria de Guadalupe!”

When he failed to die immediately, the soldiers let go and dropped an agonized Tomas to the ground. Again, they pulled on the rope, hand over hand, until he cheered no more. Their orders were finally fulfilled around one in the morning on August 27, 1927.

Tomas was eighteen.

—

Miscellanea and facts were pulled from the following:

“From Liberal to Revolutionary Oaxaca: The View From the South, Mexico 1867-1911,” by Francie R. Chassen-Lopez.

“La Epopeya Cristera,” by Enrique Diaz Araujo.

“The Martyr of Colima,” by Anonymous, www.arquidiocesisgdl.org.

“Tomas de la Mora: Ahorcado en 1927 a los 18 Anos de Edad, por ser Fiel a Cristo y no Revelar los Nombres de sus Jefes Cristeros,” by Luis Alfonso Orozco.