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Biography

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Cruz Laplana y Laguna was a Spanish Catholic bishop of the Latin rite and a martyr of the religious persecution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War. He was born on 3 May 1878 in Plan, a small mountain village in the Pyrenean comarca of Sobrarbe, in the province of Huesca in Aragon, then belonging to the diocese of Barbastro. Formed in a rural Catholic setting, he studied for the priesthood at the diocesan seminary of Barbastro and continued his ecclesiastical education at the Pontifical University of Zaragoza. He was ordained a priest in the first years of the twentieth century and worked in the Church in Aragon as a seminary professor and in pastoral charges. Contemporary notices describe him as austere in personal habits, doctrinally conservative, and attentive to the poor.

Pope Benedict XV named him Bishop of Cuenca in late 1921; he received episcopal consecration in 1922 and took possession of that historic Castilian see. The diocese covered a largely rural territory whose cathedral city was of modest size. As ordinary he was known for a simple manner of life, for regular visitation of parishes, for care of the diocesan seminary, and for encouragement of catechesis and Catholic associations. His episcopate ran through the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera and into the Second Spanish Republic after 1931, when Spanish Catholicism met secularizing legislation, legal restrictions on the Church, and recurrent anticlerical violence. He remained a diocesan bishop of the secular clergy, not a member of a religious order, and lived under the Latin-rite discipline of clerical celibacy.

When the Civil War began in July 1936, Cuenca stayed in the Republican zone. Revolutionary militias and local committees turned on clergy and religious. Laplana y Laguna refused to abandon his see. He was arrested toward the end of July and held in confinement. On 8 August 1936 he was taken from custody together with his vicar general, Fernando Español Berdié, and shot in the countryside near Cuenca, in connection with the road toward Villar de Olalla. Accounts gathered for the later beatification process present him as meeting death with forgiveness for those who killed him. He was fifty-eight years old. Español Berdié died with him and was later beatified in the same group.

After the war his remains were recovered and in time placed in the Cathedral of Cuenca. His cause was joined to the large process for martyrs of the 1930s persecution in Spain. On 28 October 2007 Pope Benedict XVI beatified him in Rome among 498 martyrs of that persecution. He has not been canonized. In the Catholic Church he is venerated as Blessed Cruz Laplana y Laguna. His memorial is kept on 8 August, the date of his death, and he is also remembered with the wider commemoration of the Spanish martyrs of the twentieth century, especially in the diocese of Cuenca.

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