Modesto García Martí

Modesto García Martí was a Capuchin Franciscan priest from the Valencia region of Spain who was killed in the anticlerical violence of the Spanish Civil War. He was born on 17 January 1881 in Benifairó de la Valldigna, a small agricultural town in the province of Valencia. He entered the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, made his religious profession, and was ordained a priest. Like other members of his province, he lived the Capuchin life of prayer, poverty, and pastoral work among the people of eastern Spain in the early twentieth century. Surviving biographical notices are brief; they do not record extensive details of his family background or the particular houses in which he served.

In July 1936 a military uprising against the government of the Second Spanish Republic developed into a full-scale civil war. In the territory that remained under Republican control, revolutionary and anticlerical forces launched a fierce persecution of the Catholic Church. Convents were sacked, public worship was suppressed, and thousands of bishops, priests, religious men and women, and committed lay Catholics were executed. The city and province of Valencia experienced this violence with particular intensity during the summer and autumn of 1936. Religious of every order, including the Capuchins, were hunted, imprisoned, or killed.

Fray Modesto García Martí was among those who fell victim to the persecution. On 13 August 1936 he was put to death at El Saler, a coastal locality near Valencia. He was fifty-five years of age. His killing, like those of his fellow martyrs, was later judged by the Church to have been motivated by hatred of the faith. The precise circumstances of his capture and execution are recorded only in summary form in the documentation assembled for the beatification process.

On 11 March 2001 Pope John Paul II beatified Modesto García Martí together with 232 other martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, the great majority of them linked to the Archdiocese of Valencia. The ceremony took place in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. These 233 blesseds form one of several large groups of Spanish Civil War martyrs raised to the honors of the altar in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Veneration of Blessed Modesto remains primarily local, within the Capuchin order and the dioceses of Valencia. He has not been canonized.