Fernando García Sendra

Fernando García Sendra was a Spanish diocesan priest of the Archdiocese of Valencia who was killed in the anti-clerical violence of the Spanish Civil War. He was born in 1905 in Alcoy, an industrial town in the province of Alicante in eastern Spain. Formed in the seminary of Valencia in the early twentieth century, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1930. He belonged to the secular clergy rather than to a religious order and served under the archbishop of Valencia in ordinary parish ministry in the years just before the war.

As a young priest he worked as a coadjutor and later as a parish priest in the Valencian Country, including pastoral service associated with the parish of Beniarrés. His ministry unfolded against the background of the Second Spanish Republic, proclaimed in 1931, which brought anticlerical legislation and growing political polarization. Like many clergy of his generation he was engaged in the sacraments, catechesis, and the routine life of small-town and rural parishes when the military uprising of July 1936 plunged Spain into civil war.

In the Republican zone, especially in the first months of the conflict, thousands of bishops, priests, religious, and lay Catholics were killed in what the Church later judged to be persecution in odium fidei. García Sendra was arrested and put to death on 27 August 1936 at the age of thirty-one. His martyrdom belongs to the large cluster of killings of clergy in the provinces of Valencia, Alicante, and Castellón. Surviving notices of his last days and of the precise place of burial are brief, as is common for many of the lesser-known victims of that wave of violence.

On 11 March 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified 233 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, a group often called the Martyrs of Valencia, among whom was Fernando García Sendra. They remain Blesseds and have not been canonized. Their memory is kept in the local churches of eastern Spain and in the wider Catholic commemoration of twentieth-century martyrs. Individual liturgical observance for García Sendra is commonly linked to the date of his death.