Constantino Carbonell Sempere

Constantino Carbonell Sempere was a Spanish Jesuit priest who suffered martyrdom during the religious persecution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War. He was born in 1866 in Alcoy, a town in the province of Alicante in the Valencian region of eastern Spain. Historical sources provide few particulars about his family or early years. He entered the Society of Jesus and, after the customary years of novitiate, studies, and tertianship, was ordained to the priesthood. The Jesuits of his era in Spain were engaged principally in education, the giving of spiritual exercises, and parish missions.

During the first decades of the twentieth century the Catholic Church in Spain faced increasing political hostility. The Second Republic, established in 1931, enacted anticlerical measures that included the expulsion of the Jesuits from the country in 1932. Many members of the order continued their apostolic work in a reduced or clandestine manner. When civil war broke out in July 1936, a ferocious wave of anticlerical violence swept through the Republican zone. In the provinces of Valencia and Alicante, large numbers of priests, religious, and Catholic lay people were arrested and killed in the summer and autumn of that year.

Father Carbonell, already advanced in age, was taken prisoner and put to death in 1936 at Gandía in the province of Valencia. The Church has judged that he was killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the Christian faith. Relatively little is recorded of his last days, a circumstance typical of many of the lesser-known victims of that persecution.

On 11 March 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified Constantino Carbonell Sempere in Saint Peter's Square together with 232 other martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, the great majority of them linked to the Archdiocese of Valencia. The group is commonly referred to as the 233 Spanish Martyrs. Their collective witness is commemorated by the Church as an example of fidelity amid one of the most intense episodes of anti-Catholic violence in twentieth-century Europe. Blessed Constantino remains a relatively obscure figure whose biography is known chiefly through the acts of his beatification process rather than through extensive contemporary documentation.