Juli Junyer i Padern

Juli Junyer i Padern was a Catalan Catholic priest of the Salesian congregation who died as a martyr during the Spanish Civil War. He was born in 1892 in Castelló d'Empúries, in the province of Girona in Catalonia, in northeastern Spain. The town belongs to the historic Empordà district. In his youth he entered the Salesians of Don Bosco, the society founded by Saint John Bosco for the Christian education of the young, especially the poor. He completed Salesian formation and was ordained a priest, binding himself to the celibate religious life of the congregation.

As a Salesian priest in Catalonia he shared in the typical works of the order in the early twentieth century: schools, oratories, and pastoral care of boys and young men. The Salesians had established several houses in and around Barcelona and elsewhere in Catalonia. His ministry belonged to that world of popular Catholic education at a time when Spanish public life was becoming sharply divided between secular, anticlerical currents and traditional Catholic culture. Widely available sources do not preserve a full itinerary of the houses in which he served, but they agree that he remained a priest of the congregation until his death.

The Spanish Civil War, which began in July 1936, brought intense anticlerical violence in the Republican zone, including Catalonia. Churches were sacked, communities of religious were broken up, and large numbers of bishops, priests, religious, and lay Catholics were imprisoned or killed. Many Salesians were among the victims. Junyer i Padern lived through this persecution. Unlike most clerical victims, who died in 1936, he survived into the later years of the war, while Catalonia was still under Republican control. In 1938 he was arrested. He was put to death on 28 November 1938 in Barcelona. The Church later judged that he had been killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith.

Pope John Paul II beatified him in Rome on 11 March 2001 as one of a large group of martyrs of the religious persecution in Spain. He is honored as Blessed Juli Junyer i Padern. His memory is kept among the Salesian martyrs of Spain and among the Catalan clergy who died in the Civil War. Details of his childhood, the precise circumstances of his arrest, and his place of burial are not abundantly documented in widely accessible historical literature, but the essential facts of his birth, religious profession, priesthood, and martyrdom rest on the records associated with his beatification.