Rafael Guízar y Valencia

Rafael Guízar y Valencia was born in 1878 in Cotija, in the state of Michoacán in western Mexico. He came from a landowning family that was firmly Catholic in a region with a strong religious tradition. As a boy he was sent to study with the aim of the priesthood, attending seminaries associated with the Diocese of Zamora. He received priestly ordination in 1901. In the first decade of the twentieth century he worked as a missionary preacher, traveling from town to town to give spiritual exercises, to encourage Catholic associations, and to support Catholic journalism and schooling. Mexico at that time was experiencing the late Porfirian order and then the shock of revolution; the Church's public role was already contested by liberal and anticlerical currents.

After the Revolution of 1910, violence and shifting governments made pastoral work hazardous. Guízar persisted in ministry, sometimes forced to leave a locality at short notice. In 1919 he was chosen as bishop of Veracruz, a diocese that stretched along the Gulf coast and included both port cities and isolated mountain and rural districts. Political conditions prevented a normal installation; he was consecrated bishop that same year outside his territory. Throughout the 1920s the Mexican state's campaign against the Church intensified. Laws restricted worship, expelled foreign clergy, and closed seminaries and schools. The armed Cristero uprising of 1926-1929 brought open conflict. Bishop Guízar spent long intervals in exile in the United States and in several countries of the Caribbean and Central and South America. There he continued to preach, to gather Mexican exiles, and to seek support for the Church in Mexico. Accounts of his exile describe him living in poverty and at times concealing his identity so that he could still reach ordinary Catholics.

When a modus vivendi allowed many bishops to return after 1929, Guízar went back to Veracruz. He set about reopening and strengthening the seminary, restoring parish life, and making lengthy pastoral visitations. He was known for giving away personal belongings and for a direct, unpretentious manner with the poor and with indigenous communities. Recurring illness marked his last years. In 1938 he died in Mexico City. His remains were subsequently transferred to the cathedral of Xalapa, the principal church of his diocese, where they are venerated.

The process for his beatification was introduced in due course. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1995. Pope Benedict XVI canonized him in 2006 during a ceremony in Saint Peter's Square, an event that highlighted him as the first bishop born in Mexico to be declared a saint. Catholic memory of Rafael Guízar y Valencia emphasizes his endurance during one of the most severe episodes of anti-Catholic persecution in twentieth-century Latin America, his missionary spirit, and his identification with the poor. His liturgical memorial is kept on 6 June.