Felipe de Jesús Munárriz and fellow martyrs (+1936)

Biography

The statement repeated by the militiamen, that it was enough for the missionaries to abandon their religious commitments to save their lives, points to a hostility, not against the people, but against what they represented, faith, Church. “They shoot us solely for being religious,” some of these martyrs wrote. Of the 51 martyrs (priests, brothers and seminarians), only 9 were over 25 years old; 9 were 22 years old and 3 had only turned 21. They were imprisoned in the assembly hall of the Piarist school. There they suffered all kinds of discomfort, water rationing, stifling heat and mock executions. They introduced prostitutes into the room to provoke them, with the threat of immediate execution if they crossed them. But not a single one gave up. The offers of release that several of them received from the militiamen were of no use either: they preferred to follow the fate of their companions and die martyrs like them. They recorded in writing and signed with their signatures the “Last Offering to the Congregation of their Martyred Sons”: August 12, 1936. In Barbastro. Six of our colleagues are already martyrs, we soon hope to be martyrs, but first we want to state that we died forgiving those who take our lives and offering them for the Christian orientation of the working world, but also for the definitive reign of the Catholic Church, for our beloved congregation and for our beloved families." They were beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 25, 1992. Their remains are venerated in the church of the Heart of Mary, in Barbastro.