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.)
