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Biography

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Diego Llorca Llopis was a Spanish diocesan priest of the Archdiocese of Valencia and a martyr of the Catholic Church, later numbered among the large group of clergy and laity from that see who were killed during the religious persecution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War. He was born on 25 October 1896 in Benissa (often written Benisa in older Castilian sources), a municipality in the province of Alicante in the Valencian Community of eastern Spain. He was formed for the priesthood and ordained for Valencia, in whose territory he exercised his ministry in the early twentieth century. Detailed surviving accounts of his personal character, seminary years, and specific parish assignments are sparse, as is common for many of the parish priests later included in the collective beatifications of Spanish Civil War martyrs.

In July 1936 a military uprising against the government of the Second Spanish Republic opened a civil war that lasted until 1939. In the Republican zone, and with particular intensity in the first months in regions such as Valencia, an anticlerical campaign unfolded: churches and convents were sacked or burned, public worship was suppressed, and bishops, priests, religious, and committed lay Catholics were imprisoned or summarily executed. Historians and the later processes of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints documented thousands of such deaths across Spain. The Archdiocese of Valencia was among the sees that suffered the greatest number of priestly victims in 1936 and the years immediately following.

Father Diego Llorca Llopis was arrested in the course of this persecution and was put to death on 6 September 1936 at Gilet, in the province of Valencia. He was thirty-nine years old. The Church subsequently determined that he had been killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith. His death belongs to the same pattern as that of many other diocesan priests of Valencia who were taken from their residences or places of hiding and shot in the late summer and autumn of 1936.

On 11 March 2001, in Saint Peter's Square, Pope John Paul II beatified 233 martyrs of the Archdiocese of Valencia who had died between 1936 and 1939. The group comprised diocesan priests, members of religious congregations, and lay men and women. A decree of martyrdom for the cause had been promulgated in 1999. Diego Llorca Llopis was included among the diocesan priests of that beatification. He has not been canonized. The blessed martyrs of Valencia are commemorated liturgically on 22 September in the local calendar, while his individual memorial is associated with the date of his death. Devotion to him is primarily local and historical, as a witness to priestly fidelity and to the Catholic faith under twentieth-century persecution in Spain.

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