Saint Christopher Magallanes, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs

During the persecution of the Church in Mexico in the 1910s and 1920s, when laws closed churches and seminaries and forbade worship, priests and laymen who continued to serve were hunted down. Many were shot during the Cristero War of 1926–1929. Twenty-five of them, most of them priests, were canonized in 2000.

Cristóbal Magallanes, born in 1869, was parish priest of his home town of Totatiche in Jalisco, where he opened a secret seminary after the one in Guadalajara was closed. He wrote and preached against armed rebellion, but was arrested on his way to say Mass and, on 25 May 1927, shot without trial at Colotlán, with a young priest, Agustín Caloca. He gave his last belongings to the soldiers and said that he died innocent, asking that his blood unite his Mexican brothers.