Life of a rural priest

Los Altos de Jalisco · 1900

Santa Ana de Guadalupe

Santa Ana de Guadalupe is a ranchería — a small rural settlement, not a town, not a village: a ranchería. It belongs to the municipality of Jalostotitlán, in the Los Altos de Jalisco region, 11 kilometers from the municipal seat and half an hour from the Marian shrine of San Juan de los Lagos. In 1900 it had fewer than two hundred inhabitants, and in 2026 it still has fewer than four hundred. The Romo family had been living there since the early 17th century, when they arrived from Vivar — the Castilian town where El Cid was born — and settled in the canyon.

Toribio Romo González was born in Santa Ana at four in the morning on April 16, 1900. He was the third child of Patricio Romo Pérez and Juana González Romo, Catholic peasants. The next day they took him to be baptized at the parish of the Virgin of the Assumption, in Jalostotitlán. He had two siblings who matter to this story: his older sister María, who taught him his first letters and who would be present at the moment of his death, and his younger brother Román, who would also become a priest and would later write the hagiography and promote the cause for beatification.

Toribio's parents were poor but not destitute. They had a small adobe house and some land. María, the older sister, saw early that Toribio was a different kind of child: serious, quiet, drawn to the village church from the age of six as an altar boy. When he turned twelve, María convinced her parents — who hesitated, because he was needed in the fields — to send him to the auxiliary seminary of San Juan de los Lagos. He entered in 1912. He was twelve years and four months old.

Seminary and Revolution

Toribio's seminary years coincided with the years of the Mexican Revolution. While he memorized Latin and Thomist philosophy at San Juan de los Lagos and later at the major seminary in Guadalajara, the country was tearing itself apart: Madero, Huerta, Carranza, Obregón, Villa, Zapata. Seminaries closed and reopened at the whim of local politics. At several points, seminarians had to study in private houses with books hidden away.

Toribio was ordained a priest on December 23, 1922, in Guadalajara, with special permission from the archbishop because he was only twenty-two and canon law required twenty-four. He celebrated his first solemn Mass on January 5, 1923, in the Chapel of the Mesita in his hometown, dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe — a chapel whose final vault had been closed only hours before, during the dawn of that same day. It is said that at that first Mass he asked God for a grace he would later repeat every day of his life: «Lord, do not leave me, nor permit a day of my life to pass without my saying the Mass, without receiving your embrace in communion.» The prayer was granted.

1922 – 1927

Five parishes

Before arriving in Tequila in 1927, Father Toribio was sent to five different destinations, all in the state of Jalisco. In none did he stay long. Some of these transfers were due to pastoral necessity; others, to conflicts with pastors who did not understand his way of working with the poor and indigenous peoples.

1927 · Diary fragment

The voice from clandestinity

During the months of itinerant flight, Toribio kept a brief diary. Only fragments survive, copied by his brother Román and later disseminated in the canonical biographies. The following passage is dated around June 24, 1927, when Toribio had already changed refuge several times and was approaching the moment of accepting his definitive commission to Tequila:

The fragment is one of the few first-person testimonies in existence about the concrete experience of the clandestine priests of the Cristiada. What stands out is not the complaint — there is one, but controlled — but the juxtaposition of the physical and the spiritual. «Foul-smelling caves» alongside «blessed be He». Ten flights in six months, some lasting fifteen days in the open; and, in the middle of them, gratitude. Toribio was constructing, almost without intending to, the spiritual vocabulary with which migrants would later identify: faith as something sustained not in words but in the body that crosses the desert.

Agua Caliente · September 1927 – February 1928

The ravine

Father Toribio could not live in the parish house in Tequila: it was the first place anyone would look for him. Nor could he leave the municipality without orders, because his archbishop — Francisco Orozco y Jiménez, hiding in the mountains — had entrusted him with that portion of the flock.

The solution came from a local landowner, Mr. León Aguirre: his ranch, at the place called Agua Caliente on the outskirts of Tequila, had an abandoned tequila distillery. The building stood at the bottom of a ravine, hidden from the roads, surrounded by gorges through which one could escape if soldiers came. There Father Toribio installed himself. He slept on a cot, celebrated Mass in the empty distillery, went out at night to visit the sick and dying of Tequila, and returned before dawn.

The three Romos

In December 1927, Toribio's younger brother Román Romo González was ordained a priest. The bishop sent him also to Tequila, as assistant vicar. The two brothers divided the work: one celebrated Mass in the ravine while the other visited the sick, and the following week they switched roles. A few days later, their older sister María also arrived, to keep house. The three siblings — the two priests and the sister — shared the shelter at Agua Caliente.

They were the five happiest and most tense months of Father Toribio's life. Happy because for the first time he had his family with him and celebrated Mass every day. Tense because rumors of informers arrived each week, and he knew it was only a matter of time.

Family memory

Margarita Romo Enríquez, a niece of Toribio, preserved decades of family stories. One of the most cited takes place in Santa Ana around 1904 or 1905:

The premonition

Toward the middle of February 1928, Father Toribio began to speak of his own death with a serenity that unsettled his sister. He would say to Román: «If they kill me, you keep walking the road. Don't stop.» One day, during dinner, he suddenly got up, knelt down, and asked for absolution — «just in case». The brothers looked at each other and obeyed.

On Ash Wednesday, February 22, Father Toribio asked Román to hear his sacramental confession and give him a long blessing. Before leaving, he handed him a letter and asked him not to open it until he ordered. Román kept it without asking. Three days later he understood why.

The dawn of February 25, 1928, is the subject of the next chapter. →