San Joselito

José Sánchez del Río was a young boy growing up in the small town of Sahuayo, Michoacán, during the early 20th century. This made him an unremarkable character, but for the Cristero rebellion which broke out in 1926, and that’s where his story gets interesting.

The rebellion known in Mexico as La Christiada began when Presidente Plutarco Elías Calles sought to enforce the strong anti-religious (and specifically in 20th century Mexico, anti-Catholic Church) provisions of the 1917 constitution. The Church had been a vocal opponent of the revolution, and the victorious socialist government wrote provisions into that constitution basically separating Church and State. In 1926 however, Presidente Calles took this a step further, instituting fines for wearing a Roman collar in public, sentencing priests who criticized the government to prison for five years, seizing all Church property, closing all religious institutions, and dramatically limiting the number of priests allowed in the country in an attempt to eliminate the Church as a competing power center.

Religiously conservative states like Jalisco and Michoacán went into open revolt against the government, and a guerrilla war went on for three years. Total battle deaths topped 100,000 during the war, a proportional rate about half that of the US civil war. As is often the case in insurgencies both sides engaged in atrocities, and one of the victims was young Josélito.

He repeatedly sought to join his older brothers in the Cristero cause, but he was refused due to only being twelve years old. Eventually he was permitted to join as a flag bearer, then eventually a fighter. During a losing battle near his hometown of Sahuayo, he gave his horse to General Guizar Morfin, who escaped the battlefield while Josélito fought on and was captured.

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Josélito was held in his own village Church, which the government had turned into its military headquarters/prison. For two weeks, he was beaten, forced to watch an execution, and encouraged to renounce his faith. When this failed, his captors tortured him with a machete, then skinned the soles of his feet and forced him to walk to his own execution site, all the while encouraging his apostasy. Next to a shallow grave, he was repeatedly stabbed as he shouted “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” until he was shot in the head.

The Cristero rebellion ended after a settlement negotiated under the auspices of the US Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Whitney. Presidente Calles’ stringent laws remained on the books, but were largely unenforced. The Catholic Church and the Mexican federal government came to a modus vivendi which went through periods of resistance and repression that lasted all the way to 1992. In 2016, Pope Francis canonized Josélito.

Since we were on the south side of the lake near the Jalisco-Michoacán border, it was a short drive to Sahuayo, where we were blest to see San Josélito’s Church/prison, and the site of his execution.