Writings of the twenty-seven-year-old priest

¡Vámonos al Norte! (Let's Go North!)

A one-act play written by the seminarian Toribio Romo González around 1920, when he was twenty years old and preparing the final stages of his priestly formation. It is not held in any publicly accessible archive; the text is known through a reference in Father Román's biography and, more recently, through David Romo's essay in Texas Monthly (2010), where the author describes it after reviewing it in family archives.

Genre and context

It belongs to the genre of Mexican moralizing pastorelas — short comedies written by priests and seminarians to be performed at village festivals. The aim is both catechetical and communal: to laugh with the people while teaching them. The tone is popular, direct, with nods to the speech of the Jalisco highland ranchos.

Plot

Don Rogaciano, a Mexican migrant returning from the United States, arrives in his hometown turned into an americanized gentleman: he speaks broken English, despises the ways of the countryside, wears city clothes, mocks the local priest. Sancho, a sharp peasant who never left the village, confronts him with common sense and a series of jokes that dismantle his air of superiority. At the end, Rogaciano recognizes that the values of his homeland — family, faith, honest work — are what really matter, and that what he brought back from the North does not make up for what he lost by leaving.

A reading

It is a play of modest literary ambition. It does not pretend to drama. What makes it interesting, a century later, is that its author — a priest who preached against emigration from the pulpit — would become the heavenly patron of the very migrants he tried to hold back. The irony does not make the play less important; it makes it more human. Toribio spoke from the ideological position of his Church in his time. What came later — the recognition as protector of the displaced — belongs to the next chapter of his life, the one he did not live to write.

A serious investigation of the play is still pending. As far as is known, the original manuscript is in the hands of descendants of the Romo family. David Romo and some Mexican scholars have requested access for a critical edition; the project remains open.

The testamentary letter

Three days before his martyrdom, Father Toribio asked his brother Román to hear his confession and give him a long blessing. Before parting, he handed him a sealed letter, with instructions not to open it without express order. While in flight, after learning of his brother's death, Román opened it in Guadalajara. The text survives because he transcribed it later:

A reading

It is a brief, plainspoken text, with no theological grandiosity. What it says is what a son would say to another son: look after the old ones, look after your sister, pay what I owe. The absence of grandeur is precisely what moves the reader. Father Toribio knew he was going to die. He did not write a statement about the meaning of martyrdom. He wrote a list of domestic errands and small debts. A saint is not always an epic hero. Sometimes he is someone who does not want to die owing three pesos and fifty cents to the priest of another town.

The daily prayer

On the day of his priestly ordination, December 23, 1922, and even more during his first solemn Mass in Santa Ana, Father Toribio formulated a prayer he would repeat daily until the day of his death. The prayer is transmitted in nearly all biographies and forms part of the private liturgy associated with his devotion. The canonical form most widely disseminated is:

Fulfilled. Between 1923 and February 1928 — six years and two months — there is no record of Father Toribio passing a single day without celebrating the Eucharist. Not even during the months of itinerant flight across the ranchos of Los Altos did he interrupt it. He celebrated in kitchens, in stables, under trees, in the abandoned distillery of Agua Caliente. The last day he managed to celebrate was Friday, February 24, 1928. The following dawn the gunfire prevented what would have been one of the few exceptions to the prayer.

«Tequila, you offer me a grave»

Words spoken on arriving in Tequila, Jalisco, as new parish priest in September 1927, according to the testimony of his sister María. They are not a written work in the strict sense but a remembered phrase. Its rhythmic form — two parallel hemistichs — suggests that Toribio uttered it with the awareness of one who knows he is saying something memorable:

These are possibly the saint's most quoted words. They say two things worth separating. The first: Toribio knew he was going to die in Tequila. It was not a vague premonition; it was knowledge grounded in facts — the presence of a federal garrison, the standing execution orders, the systematic persecution of clandestine priests in that area. The second: his response to that knowledge was not to evade his fate, but to embrace it with the language of offering. Tequila would be the grave; he would be the heart. The exchange, in its form, is eucharistic: bread and wine, body and blood, grave and heart.

The parish registers of Tequila

The final hours of Father Toribio's life he dedicated, methodically, to organizing the parish registers of Tequila: records of baptisms, marriages, deaths, and confirmations he had managed to administer during his months of clandestinity. He worked all day on Friday, February 24, and all night until five in the morning on Saturday, February 25. When the soldiers entered his room, the registers lay on the table, in order, and were looted along with the other objects of the house. They are not preserved in their entirety.

Fragments of these registers — notes of baptisms administered clandestinely in the ravine of Agua Caliente, records of weddings celebrated in barns — have been recovered at various moments through the faithful who preserved them. They are scattered among diocesan and family archives of Jalisco. A consolidated edition would be an important archival project. For now, it does not exist.