Leonardo Olivera Buera

Leonardo Olivera Buera was a Spanish diocesan priest of the Diocese of Tarazona who was killed in the anticlerical violence of the Spanish Civil War. He was born on 5 March 1884 in Alpartir, a village in the province of Zaragoza in Aragon. He studied at the seminary of Tarazona, was ordained to the priesthood in the early twentieth century, and spent his ministry as a member of the secular clergy serving parishes in that diocese rather than as a member of a religious order.

When the Civil War began in July 1936, Republican militias in much of Aragon carried out a systematic persecution of the Catholic Church. Priests were arrested, imprisoned, and frequently executed. Olivera Buera, then in his early fifties and engaged in pastoral work in the Calatayud area, was seized in the first days of the conflict.

He was shot on 25 July 1936 at Calatayud in the province of Zaragoza. His death belonged to the wave of killings in the Republican zone in 1936, later described by the Church as martyrdom in odium fidei (out of hatred for the faith), in which thousands of bishops, priests, religious, and lay Catholics lost their lives.

He was included among the 522 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War beatified in Tarragona on 13 October 2013, during the pontificate of Pope Francis. He is venerated in the Catholic Church as Blessed Leonardo Olivera Buera. His liturgical memorial is kept on 25 July, the date of his death. He has not been canonized, and standard sources do not assign him a distinctive list of patronages beyond the general commemoration of the twentieth-century Spanish martyrs.