Manuel Basulto Jiménez

Manuel Basulto Jiménez was born on 17 May 1862 in Pozo Alcón, a municipality in the Sierra de Cazorla district of the province of Jaén in Andalusia, southern Spain. He received his ecclesiastical formation in the diocesan seminary of Jaén and completed the philosophical and theological course then customary for secular clergy. He was ordained a priest in 1885 for the Diocese of Jaén. In the following years he served as a parish priest and in diocesan administration and teaching, working in a largely rural see marked by agrarian poverty and by the slow advance of liberal and anticlerical currents in Spanish public life.

In 1909 Pope Pius X appointed him Bishop of Lugo, in Galicia. He received episcopal consecration in 1910 and spent about a decade governing that northwestern diocese, occupied with visitation, clerical discipline, and the pastoral care of a conservative Catholic population. In December 1919 Pope Benedict XV transferred him to Jaén, the diocese of his origin; he took possession of the see in 1920 and remained its bishop until his death. During the 1920s and early 1930s he directed seminary formation, parish life, and Catholic associations through the end of the Restoration, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, and the Second Spanish Republic, whose secularizing laws from 1931 affected education, religious communities, and the public standing of the Church.

After the military rising of July 1936, Jaén remained in the Republican zone, where armed anticlerical violence quickly followed. Churches and the episcopal palace were occupied. Bishop Basulto was detained in the first days of August 1936 and imprisoned with other clergy and lay Catholics. His sister Teresa Basulto Jiménez, who lived in the episcopal household, was arrested with him. On 12 August 1936 the bishop, his sister, Félix Pérez Portela (dean of the Jaén cathedral chapter), and other prisoners were taken from Jaén by train toward Madrid. In the Madrid area they were removed from the convoy and shot by Republican militiamen. He was seventy-four. Catholic accounts have consistently treated the killing as martyrdom in hatred of the faith and of the episcopal office.

After the Civil War his remains were recovered and taken to Jaén, where they rest in the cathedral. The cause of the martyrs of the Diocese of Jaén advanced in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. On 13 October 2013, at Tarragona, Cardinal Angelo Amato, acting for Pope Francis, beatified 522 victims of the 1930s religious persecution in Spain, among them Manuel Basulto Jiménez and his sister Teresa. He is honored as Blessed Manuel Basulto Jiménez, bishop and martyr. His memorial is kept on 12 August, the date of his death, and he is remembered in Jaén as a pastor who remained with his diocese and died for his office and his faith.