Ismael Escrihuela Esteve

Ismael Escrihuela Esteve was a Spanish Roman Catholic layman from the province of Valencia, remembered as one of the martyrs of the religious persecution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War. He was born in 1902 in the town of Alberic (also known in Spanish as Alberique), in a rural district of eastern Spain. He worked as a farmer and belonged to the world of ordinary village life rather than to the clergy or a religious order. In the early twentieth century he became an active member of Catholic Action (Acción Católica), the apostolic association of the laity encouraged by the popes of that period, through which committed Catholics sought to live and spread the faith among neighbors and fellow workers. Surviving notices from the later beatification process present him as a man of known piety whose public Catholic identity was not hidden.

The 1930s brought intense political and anticlerical conflict to Spain. After the Civil War began in July 1936, large parts of the Republican zone, including much of Valencia province, saw a wave of killings of bishops, priests, religious, and committed lay Catholics. Escrihuela Esteve was seized because of his faith and his involvement in Catholic Action. According to the accounts assembled for the Church’s inquiry, he was put to death on 29 September 1936 in or near Alberic, in odium fidei—out of hatred for the faith—during the first months of the so-called Red Terror. He was in his mid-thirties. Widely available sources do not preserve a detailed trial record or last words comparable to those of some better-documented martyrs; what is attested is his identity as a practicing Catholic layman killed in the persecution of 1936.

He was included among the 233 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War beatified by Pope John Paul II in Rome on 11 March 2001. That group, headed by the priest José Aparicio Sanz, comprised clergy, religious, and lay faithful killed between 1936 and 1939, principally in the Archdiocese of Valencia and neighboring dioceses. Escrihuela Esteve is therefore venerated in the Catholic Church as Blessed Ismael Escrihuela Esteve. He has not been canonized. The collective liturgical memorial of these 233 blesseds is kept on 22 September; local calendars may also recall him on the anniversary of his death. Devotion remains primarily local, in Alberic and the Valencian church, within the wider cult of the Spanish Civil War martyrs.

Little is recorded in reliable public sources about his family circumstances. Notices do not document a spouse or children, nor do they state that he was bound by a public vow of celibacy; those fields therefore remain unknown. He was not a member of a religious order. Place of burial is not securely established in the summaries commonly cited, as many victims of 1936 were interred hastily or in common graves and only later, if at all, translated to churches. What can be said with confidence is that he represents the lay faithful of rural Valencia who were killed for remaining publicly Catholic in a time of persecution, and that the Holy See judged his death to be martyrdom when it beatified him with his companions in 2001.