Martyrs of Turon

The Martyrs of Turón comprise nine Catholic religious who were executed on 9 October 1934 in Turón, a coal-mining town in the region of Asturias in northern Spain. The killings took place during the Asturian Revolution of October 1934, a short-lived but extremely violent uprising of socialist, anarchist, and communist miners against the government of the Second Spanish Republic. Eight of the victims were members of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, commonly known as the De La Salle Brothers, who conducted a school for working-class and mining families in the town. The ninth was a priest of the Congregation of the Passion, Inocencio of Mary Immaculate (in the world, Manuel Canoura Arnau), a native of Galicia who had come to Turón to preach a mission and to administer the sacraments. Their deaths preceded the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 by two years, yet they are frequently associated with the larger number of clergy and religious slain in Spain in the 1930s, and they became the first group from that historical setting to be raised to the honors of the altar as saints.

The Lasallian community at Turón lived according to the rule of their institute, combining classroom teaching with a regular round of community prayer. Their director was Brother Cirilo Bertrán (José Sanz Tejedor). The other brothers were Marciano José (Filomeno López y López), Julián Alfredo (Vilfrido Fernández Zapico), Victoriano Pío (Claudio Bernabé Cano), Benjamín Julián (Vicente Alonso Andrés), Benito de Jesús (Héctor Valdivielso Sáez), Aniceto Adolfo (Manuel Seco Gutiérrez), and Augusto Andrés (Román Martínez Fernández). Most had been born in various provinces of northern and central Spain; Brother Benito de Jesús had been born in Buenos Aires and had entered the institute in Argentina before being assigned to Spain, and he is commonly described as the first person born in Argentina to be canonized. Father Inocencio was not on the school faculty; he was a guest in the brothers' house while serving the local parish. In the first days of October 1934, revolutionary committees took control of the mining valleys of Asturias, closed or burned churches, and arrested clergy and religious as class enemies and representatives of Catholicism.

The nine men were detained, confined, and, after a few days, led to the cemetery of Turón, where they were shot by a firing squad. No regular judicial process is recorded. Church authorities later judged that they had been killed out of hatred for the faith, in a climate in which religious habit and priestly identity were themselves treated as sufficient cause for execution. When the Spanish army and Civil Guard reconquered Asturias later in October 1934, the bodies were recovered from a common burial. Identification and Christian burial followed, and a cult of memory grew among Lasallians, Passionists, and the Catholic population of Asturias.

The cause of beatification proceeded in the late twentieth century. Pope John Paul II beatified the nine martyrs on 29 April 1990 and canonized them on 21 November 1999 in Saint Peter's Square. Their feast is kept on 9 October. They are invoked especially within the De La Salle network of schools and by the Passionist congregation; Brother Benito de Jesús is a particular focus of devotion in Argentina. In Catholic historiography they illustrate both the anti-clerical violence that erupted in parts of Spain in the 1930s and the willingness of teaching brothers and a missionary priest to remain with the people they served until death.