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Biography

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Manuel Gómez González was a Spanish diocesan priest and missionary who was killed in southern Brazil in 1924 and later beatified by the Catholic Church. He was born in 1877 in the rural parish of San José de Ribarteme, in the municipality of Ponteareas in the province of Pontevedra, Galicia. Formed for the secular clergy of the Diocese of Tui, he was ordained a priest in the early twentieth century and first exercised parish ministry in Spain. After some years of pastoral work in his native region he volunteered for the missions and left for Brazil, where a shortage of priests and a large immigrant and rural population created a demanding field of apostolate.

In Brazil he served in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, working among scattered settlements and traveling long distances on horseback to celebrate Mass, administer the sacraments, and instruct the faithful. His ministry is associated with the region of Palmeira das Missões and with more remote districts in the northwest of the state. Accounts of his life present him as a priest of simple habits and pastoral zeal, sharing the hardships of isolated communities rather than remaining in a single well-established parish. He was not a member of a religious order; he remained a diocesan missionary priest.

In May 1924, during a period of armed political unrest in Rio Grande do Sul, he set out on a pastoral journey accompanied by Adílio Daronch, a local adolescent of about fifteen who served as his altar server and companion. On 21 May 1924, near Feijão Cru (in what is now the municipality of Três Passos), the priest and the boy were intercepted by a group of armed men connected with the revolutionary conflict and were killed. The Church later judged their deaths to be martyrdom suffered in the exercise of their Christian and pastoral mission.

Local devotion to the two victims persisted in Rio Grande do Sul and among Catholics in Galicia who remembered the missionary from Ponteareas. After the diocesan inquiry and the Roman process, Pope Benedict XVI beatified Manuel Gómez González together with Adílio Daronch on 21 October 2007 in Saint Peter’s Square. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 21 May, the anniversary of their death. Blessed Manuel Gómez González is venerated as a missionary martyr; he has not been canonized.

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