Nicolás María Alberca y Torres

Nicolás María Alberca y Torres was a Spanish Catholic priest of the Order of Friars Minor who died as a martyr in Damascus in the mid-nineteenth century. He was born on 10 September 1830 in Aguilar de la Frontera, in the province of Córdoba in Andalusia, Spain. Surviving sources say little about his family or childhood beyond the place and date of his birth. As a young adult he entered the Franciscans, took up the life of the Friars Minor, and prepared for priestly ministry. He was ordained a priest in the late 1850s, not long before he left Spain for the missions.

After ordination he volunteered for the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, the order’s long-standing mission in Palestine, Syria, and neighboring districts of the Ottoman Empire. He was assigned to the small Franciscan community in Damascus, which maintained a convent and church and offered pastoral care to Latin-rite Catholics amid a mixed population of Muslims, Druze, and Eastern Christians, including Maronites. Alberca reached Damascus only a short time before the outbreak of the violence in which he died; accounts of the community stress that he was among its more recently arrived members.

In the summer of 1860, sectarian conflict that had begun in Mount Lebanon spread to Damascus. On 9 and 10 July 1860, attacks were launched against the Christian quarter of the city. Contemporary estimates of Christians killed in Damascus during those days run into the thousands. The Franciscan convent was among the places stormed. According to the testimony gathered for the later beatification process, the friars were pressed to abandon Christianity and accept Islam and refused. Nicolás María Alberca was killed on 10 July 1860, at about twenty-nine years of age, together with the guardian of the house, Manuel Ruiz, the other Franciscans of the convent, and three Maronite laymen associated with it, the brothers Francisco, Mooti, and Rafael Massabki.

The group became known as the Martyrs of Damascus. Their cause was examined in the early twentieth century, and they were beatified by Pope Pius XI on 10 October 1926. In the Roman Martyrology and in Franciscan calendars their memory is kept on 10 July, the date of their death. Alberca is venerated as a blessed martyr of the Franciscan order; he has not been canonized. Because he spent only a brief period in the Levant and died young, biographical detail beyond his birth, religious profession, mission assignment, and martyrdom remains limited. Devotion to the Damascus martyrs has been maintained especially among Franciscans and in Spanish and Levantine Catholic communities.