Special Report
The Greatest Pro of Them All
And other Zacatecans.
ZACATECAS, Mexico — Imagine a merry combination of Thomas More and Peter Sellers, and you may get a sense of an extraordinary personality who came from this silver mining capital’s adjoining colonial town of Guadalupe and, during his brief career in the early decades of the 20th century, made a lasting impact on the Mexican nation.
Mexico was suffering through one of the grimmest chapters in its history — the arrest and execution of priests and closure of churches in an overwhelmingly Catholic country that had come under control of a militant atheist dictator, Plutarco Elías Calles. One of the most successful subversives against the Calles police state was the canny, clownish Zacatecas native. According William J. O’Malley, one of his biographers, this hunted man, a clandestine priest, “had a case filled with disguises, false mustaches, putty noses, spectacles of all kinds, costumes from dungarees to morning coats, and a rubber face that could flicker from peon to patrician in an instant, no matter what the clothes.”
Like a character out of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, this real-life hero “grimly marched the streets with a huge police dog, and the police were so numerous they couldn’t tell whether he was one of them or not.” Though it was a capital offense, he administered the sacraments to hundreds of people each day in Calles’ Mexico City, right under the noses of the secret police. The pantomime-priest was Orthodoxy’s Charlie Chaplin versus the Dictatorship of Relativism. As did Chesterton and Walker Percy, he understood that sacrilege is countered most effectively not with sanctimony but with ridicule.
Had he lived a few more decades, I think this lover of satire, slapstick and puns who died at the age of 36, would have relished Percy’s Love in the Ruins, whose protagonist regards with amused horror the conflation of Christian virtue with suburban prosperity. One of Percy’s most powerful punch-lines is his description of the Christian Pro-Am Golf Tournament at Paradise Estates Country Club, whose entrance is decorated for the event with a big banner: “Jesus Christ: Greatest Pro of them All.”
Which brings us to the Mexican priest-comedian’s unusual surname, resembling a play on words: Pro.
After countless escapes and escapades, the secret police arrested Mexico’s greatest Pro — Jesuit Father Miguel Pro — in 1927. In that era before the advent of Freedom House and Amnesty International, Graham Greene noted, “The American ambassador thought he could do more good by not intervening and left the next day with the [Mexican] President and Will Rogers, the humorist, on a Pullman tour.”
Pro’s execution —without a trial — became a textbook case in how an unpopular dictatorship’s propaganda efforts can backfire. Intending to frighten the Cristero insurgents in the highlands of the states of Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Guanajuato, Calles ordered the Mexican newspapers to give detailed photographic coverage of Pro’s execution. “When he came out into the prison yard to be shot,” wrote Greene, Pro wore “a dark lounge suit, soft collar and tie, a bright cardigan. Most priests wear their mufti with a kind of uneasiness, but Pro was a good actor.”
Facing the firing squad, Pro refused a blindfold. As the rifles were raised, he lifted his arms in imitation of the crucified Christ, brandishing a crucifix in one hand and a rosary in the other. As the shots rang out, he exclaimed, “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” Graham Greene observed that the photographs of the execution had been made “to show the firmness of the Government but within a few weeks it became a penal offence to possess them, for they had had an effect which Calles had not foreseen.” The Cristero rebellion gained energy and inspiration from Pro’s martyrdom.
Jerez, in the hinterlands of Zacatecas, gave birth to one of Mexico’s greatest poets, Ramón López Velarde, who died young as so many good poets do, best known for an elaborate love-song to his homeland, Suave Patria. In the next district stand the ruins of the rich haciendas that might be called the Spanish Catholic colonial, throne-and-altar counterpart to Percy’s Protestant Paradise Estates — Valparaíso. Three centuries ago, a silver magnate with interests in Zacatecas parlayed his wealth into acquisition of a noble title from the Spanish Crown — Conde de San Mateo de Valparaíso. At the sleepy village of San Mateo, it can take a whole day just to stumble through the weedy remains of the Conde’s sumptuous palace, granaries, counting-houses, and other once imposing buildings — and this was just one of more than a dozen haciendas the Conde held in his condado. One of the first count’s descendants built a palace 500 miles away in Mexico City, now the magnificent seat of the National Bank of Mexico.
In 1822, just after Spain had conceded Mexico’s independence, in a house across the street from the palace in San Mateo was born Jesús González Ortega, who became one of the most prominent generals and liberal politicians in the 1860s War of the Reform. Streets and plazas and public buildings here and throughout Mexico tend to get named for the sanguinary figures of the Reform and the Revolution, including the unlettered marauder Francisco (Pancho) Villa and his Zacatecan sidekick Pánfilo Natera, who seized the city of Zacatecas in 1914 in one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolution. A conservative historian in Zacatecas, Bernardo del Hoyo, speaks bitterly of the myth-making and hero-worship accorded to monsters such as Villa, no more deserving of good reputation than Saddam Hussein. Del Hoyo observes, “Villa destroyed Zacatecas.” Terrorized by Pancho Villa, thousands of Zacatecans fled across the border, many to Chicago, which boasts a big community of Zacatecan origin today.
The municipio (county) of Valparaíso and its neighboring district of Huejuquilla in the highlands of Jalisco were home to the legendary Cristero fighter, Valentín Ávila, immortalized in a folk ballad “Valentín de la Sierra.” Except for a couple of recently built but already run-down houses, all that stands at what once was Valentín’s Rancho de los Landa is the new “Escuela Pública Francisco Villa.” In the ancient towns nearby Huichol Indians in their indigenous garb loiter stoically in the plazas, indifferent to the Spanish-Americans’ contentions regarding faith and disbelief, liberalism and conservatism, freemasonry and ultramontanism, history and myth.
In 1927, the parish priest of the town of Valparaíso was Mateo Correa Magallanes, the man who years earlier in Guadalupe had given the boy Miguel Pro his first communion. Like Pro, he was rounded up by the Calles government’s authorities. The head of his prison camp instructed him one day to see some condemned prisoners, Cristero leaders, who wanted the sacrament of confession. After Father Correa heard the confessions, the cacique representing Calles demanded that he tell what he had heard in the confessional. Father Correa said he would die before disclosing these confidences, and promptly he was shot.
In 2001, Pope John Paul II canonized Father Correa and some other Mexican martyrs of the era. In 1988 the same pope beatified Father Pro, whose cause for canonization is still pending.
In the Franciscan monastery in Guadalupe close to Miguel Pro’s boyhood home, a playful painter three centuries ago adorned the periphery of the atrium with scenes from the life of St. Francis. In the trompe d’oeil perspective, the toes of some of the friars in the portraits point towards the viewer whichever way the viewer moves. Teri Garr and Gene Wilder would be at home in this spooky cloister, where in several of the paintings a severely tonsured friar’s eyes follow visitors around the monastery. In another painting, a dining table appears bigger and bigger the farther one walks away from it. The paintings may have influenced Miguel Pro’s combination of irrepressible prankster and man of faith. One should hope and pray that he too will attain the highest honors of the altar and that as the years recede people will perceive his significance as ever greater. Our troubled time, like all seasons, needs heroes such as Miguel Pro.
(Mr. Duggan is a visiting professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City.)
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Rocco| 5.15.09 @ 7:29AM
About 10 years ago, I read a biography of Fr. Miguel Pro. What an incredible story and what an inspiration! He would get by, riding his bicycle, dressed like a common workman, to reach little communities to offer the Mass, proving how one little man can outwit the forces of oppression. As Mr. Duggan described him, he was quite a man and quite a priest, and died courageously in front of his firing squad. They just don't make priests like that any more.
Richard Baker| 5.15.09 @ 11:09AM
Sadly, too many of the leadership in Roman Catholicism, in America particularly, are more concerned with their images in public then being Defenders of the Faith. Father Pro didn't care about HIS image, he was concerned about Jesus' image. Rocco is right in that they don't make this kind of priest anymore.
Nick| 5.15.09 @ 6:39PM
Rocco and Mr. Baker,
I respectfully disagree. There are plenty of priests like Fr. Pro. Many of them are in China. We just don't hear about them, that's all. That also goes for monks and nuns.
Richard Baker| 5.15.09 @ 6:53PM
Nick:
Correct. Don't hear much about them and thank you for reminding me personally. Peace be with you, my brother and with those in Red China.
Rocco| 5.15.09 @ 7:32PM
Nick, You are correct - they do exist in China, and we do not hear about them. Excuse my omission; my frame of reference was the Americas and Europe.
Pax vobiscum!
Nick| 5.15.09 @ 7:43PM
Mr. Baker and Rocco,
You are both very welcome. I was pretty sure you meant here in America, but I thought I would clarify to be sure.
Although, I do know personally some very holy priests, my pastor being one. If conditions in this country were to deteriorate to those of Mexico in 1920's, I'm sure these priests would act as Fr. Pro did, as true disciples of Christ.
God Bless You Both!
Marc Jeric| 5.16.09 @ 5:27PM
Mexico is a mixture of Indians (50%), mestizos (45%), and whites (5%). Untill the 1917 the whites had the total power; after that revolution they had to share the power with the mestizos, and that sharing goes till this day. An enormous majority in the unions, the army, and the police are the mestizos (mixed white and Indian); they are by large majorities corrupt, cruel, and murderous. Drug cartels employ them almost exclusively; illegal aliens in this country consist of some 80% Indians (illiterate and unassimilable) and 20% mestizos (many of them criminals, gangsters, drug dealers). Until the 1960's Indians were forcibly held in the "ejidos" (Mexican version of Soviet kolkhozes), with land held by the village (no private property allowed), with 4 years of primary school leaving them with the knowledge of pidgin Spanish. The Mexican problems are becoming now our problems - with some 20 miilion illegals, mostly illiterate and unassimillable, led by the criminal mestizos, and soon to increase to 40 millions after the coming amnesty and the arrival of their children and elderly relatives on the dole of the SSI.
Patrick| 5.17.09 @ 12:43AM
For every bitter plot by that Liar and Murderer from the beginning, there is always sufficient grace for the righteous to do battle with, and win. While Satan prefers powers and principalities, the good Christian must rely upon being a fool to the world. After all, the folly of God is greater than the wisdom of men.
Blessed Father Pro, pray for us.
Pingback| 5.17.09 @ 1:41PM
2857 Joseph Duggan, The Greatest Pro of Them All, Spectator « Octavio Islas. Director links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Juan Negrin| 5.19.09 @ 4:30AM
The Mexican Cristero movement was a reaction by a minority of conservative Catholic people established mainly in Northwestern Mexico against the Mexican Constitutional Republic of 1917.
It tried to reestablish a Catholic Government in Mexico, which was neither acceptable to the U.S. government in the north, nor even to the Mexican people anymore, since Independence from Spain.
Some of the main actors in the area near Huejuquilla, were in fact the Huichol Indians, who were told by priests they might regain lands to which they had held titles under the Spanish vice-royalty, when they were administered by priests. Some Huichol helped the Cristero priests, who actually began losing their power shortly after 1927. President Calles ended his term in 1928, after defeating the Cristeros and the Huichol who helped the priests lost title to their land for a couple of decades, or more.
Catholic religion was not forbidden, but it was not enforced.
Augustin Duron| 5.19.09 @ 11:42AM
The Cristero War it's a big secret in Mexico, there is no mention of it in schools; if you want to learn about you have to buy a book outside, because no government text book will mention a bit of it.
And the american embassor didn't say anything because the victims were catholic priests, if the victims would have been protestants, history would have been very different.
It's no secret that US don't like catholics, there were silence in Mexico, and also there were silence in Spain; there are no words for catholic victims of massive masacres ever.
Tito Edwards | 5.21.09 @ 11:37PM
Juan Negrin,
Of course you like so many atheists and anti-Christians will continue to denigrate what happened in Mexico as nothing more than a "regional matter".
It was a nationwide revolt against the anti-Catholic government in Mexico City. They shut down most churches and monastery's and outlawed Christianity in Mexico. What the Catholics revolted for was a return to a secular government and away from the atheistic and anti-Christian President Calles.
Nuns and priests weren't allowed to wear their habits and clerics and Mass was outlawed. Distribution of the Eucharist was banned, hence why Blessed Miguel Pro had to go undercover.
As soon as the Cristeros began winning a few battles the central Mexican government sued for peace. The end result was the non-implementation of the anti-Christian laws, but thousands were murdered already by the Calles government.
Know your history before you start spouting off lies and nonsense.
Viva Huejuquilla El Alto| 6.22.09 @ 10:14PM
I am directly from Huejuquilla El Alto, Jalisco, Mexico. Our grandparents were right at the front lines in witnessing executiones. We are mixed people of Huicholes, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Irish, Dutch descent. What happened was people were arrested solely for having pictures like La Virgen De Guadalupe or having catholic mass. One old lady had her foot cut off and made to walk until she bled to death. Valentin De La Sierra was from the "Landa Rancho." Landa is also one of the major families of Huejuquilla about 45 minutes west of Valparaiso and 15 minutes east of San Antonio De Padua.
Viva Huejuquilla!
In Response to Marc Jeric| 6.23.09 @ 12:37AM
His comments about who are our politicians and the racial makeup of people in Mexico and who are the illegals in USA are not true. Benito Juarez was a full blooded mexican indian and he was president of Mexico. We have immigrant communities in Mexico and you can search for them in yahoo by typine "(name) immigrants in Mexico." (Italian, German, Jewish, Chinese and so on). A lot of high profile people in Mexico are immigrants or were immigrants.
Check out this: http://www.mexidata.info/id1442.html
Now, regarding illegals in USA, not all illegals are mexican. Just because someone speaks spanish does not mean all are from Mexico. Some are from Central America, Cuba, the Carribean islands.
Even if we stop the flow of illegals from our country of Mexico with more opportunities and programs, USA will still get illegals from other countries. Have you thought of that?
And not all politicians are corrupt. You can check out Mexican progress: http://www.presidencia.gob.mx/index_en.php
Viva Huejuquilla El Alto| 6.24.09 @ 1:03AM
Directly from Huejuquilla.
Valentin De La Sierra was not a full blooded Huichole Indian. He was from the Landa Ranch and was described as being tall with green eyes. He was hanged because he did not want to reveal the location of his friend a priest that was having a catholic mass. That was the main reason for the formation of Cristeros. Because people were being executed for keep the faith and having catholic mass. Here is a corrido:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU9ZSfT-eHg
Why Did This Happen| 7.1.09 @ 2:54PM
That Movie that just came out, "Angels and Demons," is interesting because of that I found this information as to why this happened:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholicism_and_Freemasonry
I think it has some conflict going all the back to middle ages in Europe.
Why can't we just get along?
Freemasonry Control PRI?| 7.4.09 @ 10:55PM
I had the feeling that the PRI was controlled by Freemasons for the interests of USA. To keep the supply of oil going to USA. Elias Calles, "A Freemason" and responsible for the persecution of mexican catholics founded the PRI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_Revolutionary_Party
The PRI was also responsible for the peso devaluation of the 1980's which caused immigration. But Vicente Fox made a dent into the PRI
Huejuquilla El Alto| 7.5.09 @ 12:59AM
After reading the paragraph about Pancho Villa. In the battle of Zacatecas, Pancho Villa defeated the forces of dictator Victoriano Huerta. Huerta sent 1600 soldiers that attacked our pueblo Huejuquilla. Then went on to take over the city of Zacatecas which is nearby. There was a war going on betweed the soldiers of Huerta and the rancheros. But Villa jumped in, defeated Huerta and liberated Zacatecas from Huerta. So actually Villa also liberated Mexico from the dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta. Huerta was the one that assasinated Francisco Madero and Gustavo Madero who were for democracy of Mexico.
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