Suggest an Edit — José Ramón Ferragud Girbés

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Biography

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José Ramón Ferragud Girbés was a Spanish Roman Catholic layman who died as a martyr in the religious persecution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War. He was born on 28 October 1887 in Algemesí, in the Ribera Alta of the province of Valencia in eastern Spain. He earned his living as a farmer in his native district and was formed by the parish-centered rural Catholicism of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Valencia. He did not belong to a religious order and never held ecclesiastical office; the surviving notices of his life, which are relatively brief and come chiefly from the documentation assembled for his cause of beatification, present him as an ordinary married layman of strong parish practice.

As an adult he married and raised a large family. Accounts associated with his beatification describe him as the father of eight children. He took part in Catholic Action (Acción Católica) and in the ordinary associations of local parish life. He was regarded as a practicing Catholic who attended Mass regularly and who sought to transmit the faith within his household. That public identification with the Church and with Catholic lay organizations later made him a target when anticlerical violence erupted in Republican-controlled Valencia.

After the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, churches in the region were sacked or burned, and clergy, religious, and lay people known for Catholic militancy were arrested and in many cases killed. Ferragud Girbés was seized in the course of this campaign because of his known religiosity and his membership in Catholic Action. He was put to death on 24 September 1936 at Alzira, a town near his birthplace. He was forty-eight years old. The Catholic Church later judged that he had been killed in odium fidei, that is, out of hatred for the faith.

Pope John Paul II beatified him on 11 March 2001 in Saint Peter's Square in Rome, together with 232 other martyrs of the twentieth century connected with the Archdiocese of Valencia. He has not been canonized and is therefore venerated as Blessed. In Valencia the group is commonly commemorated on 22 September, while his own dies natalis is 24 September. No extensive list of individual patronages has been attached to him; devotion remains chiefly local and is bound to the collective memory of the Valencian martyrs of 1936.

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