Jose Richard Diez OAR

José Ricardo Díez, whose name appears in some English-language references as Jose Richard Diez, was a Spanish lay brother of the Order of Augustinian Recollects and one of the religious later known as the Martyrs of Motril. He was born in 1909 in Cabañes de Esgueva, a small town in the province of Burgos in Old Castile. As a young man he entered the Recollect novitiate at Monteagudo in Navarre and professed vows as a coadjutor brother, a vocation devoted to the material and fraternal support of community life rather than to ordained ministry. The Augustinian Recollects, a reform branch of the Augustinian family that took shape in late sixteenth-century Spain, kept houses of formation in Navarre and communities of ministry across the peninsula and in the missions.

By the early 1930s Díez had been assigned to the Recollect convent in Motril, a coastal town in the province of Granada in Andalusia. The house combined regular observant life with local pastoral work. A lay brother’s labor there would have been the ordinary round of household duties, care of the church, and assistance to the priests of the community. Among his companions was the prior Vicente Soler, together with several other Recollect priests. Those years of the Second Spanish Republic brought mounting anticlerical legislation and sporadic violence against clergy and religious, which formed the immediate background to the community’s last period in Motril.

When the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936, Motril passed under revolutionary control. Religious houses were closed or assaulted, and clergy and religious were treated as enemies of the new order. On 25 July 1936 Brother José Ricardo Díez was arrested with the priests of the Motril convent. That night they were taken out and shot near the municipal cemetery, among the earliest Recollect victims of the persecution in that district. Díez was still in his twenties. The killings were summary; the religious died because of their state of life and public identification with the Church. Historical sources say little about his individual temperament or last words; he is known chiefly as a young professed brother who remained with his community and was executed with them.

The memory of the Motril community was preserved by the Order of Augustinian Recollects and by local Catholics. After the war, remains were recovered so far as circumstances allowed, and a reputation for martyrdom took hold. The cause of beatification moved through diocesan and Roman stages in the later twentieth century. On 7 March 1999 Pope John Paul II beatified Vicente Soler and his companions, including José Ricardo Díez, in Saint Peter’s Square, as part of a large recognition of martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. They have not since been canonized and remain Blesseds.

Within the Recollect Order and in Motril and Burgos, Díez is commemorated on or about 25 July, the date associated with the principal executions. He has no widely documented special patronages beyond those customarily attached to martyrs of religious persecution. Compared with more famous saints, the surviving record of his life is thin and almost entirely bound up with the fate of his convent in the summer of 1936.