José Gabriel Brochero

José Gabriel del Rosario Brochero was born on 16 March 1840 in Santa Rosa de Río Primero, in the province of Córdoba, Argentina, the fourth of ten children of Ignacio Brochero and Petrona Dávila. He grew up in a devout Catholic household of modest rural means. In 1856 he entered the seminary of Our Lady of Loreto in Córdoba, and he was ordained a priest on 4 November 1866. Shortly afterward, during a cholera epidemic in Córdoba in 1867, he distinguished himself by caring for the sick. After serving as prefect of studies at the seminary, he was appointed in 1869 pastor of the parish of San Alberto in the Traslasierra Valley, a vast, mountainous, and poorly connected region west of Córdoba whose scattered settlements had long had little regular access to the sacraments or to schools and roads.

For more than four decades Brochero made that isolated territory the field of his ministry. He traveled constantly on muleback over rough trails, wearing the poncho and broad hat of the local gauchos, and became popularly known as the Cura Gaucho. He preached in plain language, celebrated Mass in remote hamlets, heard confessions for long hours, and was famous for sharing the traditional drink of mate with anyone he met, including the poorest and the ill. He promoted the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius among lay people and built a house of exercises so that men and women of the valley could make retreats. He also worked persistently for material improvement: he founded schools, invited religious sisters to educate girls, constructed churches and chapels, opened mountain roads that linked Traslasierra with the rest of the province, and supported irrigation and other works intended to raise the living conditions of a neglected rural population.

In later life Brochero contracted Hansen’s disease (leprosy), which contemporaries attributed to his close contact with the sick, including the sharing of mate. The illness progressively disfigured his face and hands and in the end left him nearly blind, yet he continued pastoral work as long as his strength permitted. Around the first decade of the twentieth century he withdrew from active parish administration because of his condition and lived in Villa del Tránsito, the settlement that had grown around the shrine of Our Lady of the Transit and the house of exercises he had established. He died there on 26 January 1914. The town was later renamed Villa Cura Brochero in his honor, and his remains rest in the sanctuary church.

Popular devotion to Brochero spread in Córdoba and elsewhere in Argentina after his death. His cause of canonization was introduced in the twentieth century. He was beatified on 14 September 2013 at a ceremony in Villa Cura Brochero, with Cardinal Angelo Amato acting as papal legate for Pope Francis, and was canonized by Pope Francis in Saint Peter’s Square on 16 October 2016. The Catholic Church keeps his feast on 26 January. He is remembered as a diocesan priest who combined evangelical zeal with practical concern for the spiritual and social needs of a remote rural flock, and as a figure of popular Argentine Catholicism rather than as a member of a religious order or as a holder of high ecclesiastical office.