St. José Sánchez del Río was a Mexican Cristero (“soldier for Christ”) who was martyred for refusing to renounce his Catholic faith.
The Cristero War erupted in 1926 after the Mexican government began enforcing anti-clerical laws written into the Mexican Constitution. President Plutarco Elias Calles, who took office in 1924, violently targeted the Church, seizing church property, closing religious schools and convents, and exiling or executing priests. In response, largely Catholic populations across Mexico began taking up arms against the government, with the war cry “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” (“Long live Christ the King!”)
Nicknamed “Joselito,” José was born March 28, 1913, in Sahuayo, Michoacán, Mexico.
Wanting to defend the faith and rights of Catholics, he followed in the footsteps of his two older brothers and asked his mother for permission to join the Cristeros when the conflict broke out.
She objected, telling him that he was too young.
“Mama,” he replied, “do not let me lose the opportunity to gain heaven so easily and so soon.”
His parents relented and he joined the rebel army as a flagbearer.
On Feb. 5, 1928, the 14-year-old boy was captured during a battle and imprisoned in the church sacristy. In order to terrorize him, soldiers made the boy watch the hanging of one of the other captured Cristeros. But José encouraged the man, saying, “You will be in heaven before me. Prepare a place for me. Tell Christ the King I shall be with Him soon.”
In prison, he prayed the rosary and sang songs of faith. He wrote a beautiful letter to his mother telling her that he was resigned to do God's will. José's father tried desperately to ransom his son, but he was unable to raise the money in time.
On Feb. 10, 1928, his captors brutally tortured the boy – sheering off the skin of the soles of his feet and forcing him to walk on salt, followed by walking through the town to the cemetery. The young boy screamed with pain but would not give in.
At times the soldiers stopped him and said, “If you shout ‘Death to Christ the King,’ we will spare your life.” But he answered: “Long live Christ the King! Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe!”
Once he arrived at the cemetery, José was asked once more if he would deny his faith. Once more he shouted out “Long live Christ the King!”, and was summarily shot.
His mother and father were among those forced to witness his execution.
He was canonized on Oct. 16, 2016, by Pope Francis, and his feast day is Feb. 10. He is the patron saint of children and teenagers.
During a 2021 dedication of a statue of St. José Sánchez del Río at the Martyrs Shrine in Guadalajara, Mexico, Cardinal Francisco Robles Ortega, the Archbishop of Guadalajara, encouraged young people to look to “the witness and example of St. José Sánchez” to find meaning in their lives.
The cardinal lamented that “there are many young men and women who aren’t finding what to do with their lives, they don’t know what they are in this world for, they’re not discovering what they came into this world for, and live an existential void.”
These young people, he continued, “seek to fill that existential void with things that apparently fill them, but the only thing they produce is a deeper void.”
He urged them to “look at the testimony of a young man, born into an ordinary Christian family, but who had the courage to discover Christ and to be faithful to Him.”
— Vatican News Service, Catholic News Agency, Wikipedia