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Biography

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Marino Blanes Giner was a Spanish Catholic layman who died as a martyr during the religious persecution that accompanied the Spanish Civil War. He was born on 19 September 1883 in Alcoy, an industrial city in the province of Alicante in the Valencian region of eastern Spain. Alcoy was then a notable centre of textile manufacturing, and Blanes Giner earned his living in that industry. He married and was the father of a family. Unlike many of the clergy and religious killed in the same persecution, his state of life was that of a husband and father whose public identity was that of a practising Catholic in a politically polarised industrial town.

In the years before 1936 he took part in the organised lay apostolate that the Spanish Church was then promoting. He is recorded as a member of Catholic Action, the hierarchical apostolic association for the laity. Surviving notices of his life, which are relatively brief because he was a local rather than a national figure, present him as a man of regular sacramental practice and of a willingness to be known as a Catholic at a time when anticlerical sentiment was strong in parts of Spanish society, including among sectors of the republican and working-class movements in towns such as Alcoy.

When the Civil War began in July 1936, Alcoy remained in the Republican zone. Churches were attacked, public worship was suppressed, and militia groups arrested priests, religious, and laypeople identified with Catholic organisations. Because of his known involvement in Catholic Action and parish life, Blanes Giner was seized by Republican militiamen. On 8 September 1936 he was taken from custody and shot in or near Alcoy. He was fifty-two years old. The Catholic Church later judged that he was killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the Christian faith, and therefore that his death constituted martyrdom rather than a merely political or personal crime.

Pope John Paul II beatified him on 11 March 2001 in Saint Peter's Square in Rome as one of the 233 martyrs of the Archdiocese of Valencia, a group officially designated as José Aparicio Sanz and 232 companions. The group included diocesan priests, men and women religious, and laity killed in 1936 and 1937. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 22 September. Blanes Giner has not been canonized. Published biographical material about him remains limited to the summaries prepared for the beatification process and to local commemorations in Alcoy and the Archdiocese of Valencia, where he is remembered as an example of lay fidelity under persecution.

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