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Biography

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Darío Acosta Zurita was a Mexican Catholic priest of the Diocese of Veracruz, born on 14 December 1908 in the town of Naolinco in the state of Veracruz, Mexico. Little is recorded of his childhood beyond his origin in that town. He entered the diocesan seminary and completed his studies for the priesthood at a time when Mexican anticlerical laws, associated especially with the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles and with the Cristero War of 1926–1929, had closed or disrupted many churches and seminaries and had cost the lives of numerous priests and lay Catholics. He was ordained to the priesthood on 25 April 1931 by Bishop Rafael Guízar y Valencia of Veracruz, a bishop who had himself been forced into hiding and exile during the persecution and who was later canonized. Acosta Zurita belonged to the secular clergy and was not a member of a religious congregation.

His priesthood was extremely brief. On the afternoon of 25 July 1931, only three months after ordination, government soldiers entered the parish church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (Our Lady of the Assumption) in the port city of Veracruz and opened fire inside the church. Father Acosta Zurita was struck by gunfire and died there at the age of twenty-two. Sources connected with his cause of beatification describe him as engaged in pastoral ministry in the church at the time of the attack. The killing is situated in the wider pattern of violence against Catholic clergy in Mexico that did not end uniformly with the 1929 agreements (arreglos) between Church and state.

Because he was a Latin-rite diocesan priest, he lived under the discipline of clerical celibacy; there is no record of a spouse or of children. He held no episcopal, patriarchal, or papal office. His reputation for martyrdom led to his inclusion among a group of thirteen Mexican victims of the religious persecution who were beatified on 20 November 2005. Pope Benedict XVI approved the beatification. The public rite was celebrated in Guadalajara, Mexico, and was presided over by Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, then prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, as representative of the Holy See. The group included the lay Catholic leader Anacleto González Flores and several priests and lay companions.

Acosta Zurita remains a blessed of the Catholic Church and has not been canonized. The Church commemorates him on 25 July, the anniversary of his death. He is venerated as one of the martyrs of the Mexican religious persecution of the early twentieth century. No extensive list of particular patronages of places, professions, or causes is firmly documented for him in standard hagiographical references, beyond that general association with the Mexican martyrs.

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