"Long live Christ the King and the Virgin of Guadalupe!"
This was the slogan of the "Cristero" uprising in the 1920s against the anti-Catholic government of Mexico which had instituted and enforced laws against the Church in an absurd attempt to eradicate the Catholic faith in Mexico, even going so far as to ban all foreign clergy and the celebration of Mass in some regions.
St. Christopher Magallanes, along with 21 other priests and three lay companions, were martyred between 1915 and 1937, by shooting or hanging, throughout eight Mexican states, for their membership in the Cristero movement. Magallanes erected a seminary in Totatiche and he and his companions secretly preached and ministered to the faithful.
The last words heard spoken by Magallanes were from his cell, when he shouted, "I am innocent and I die innocent. I forgive with all my heart those responsible for my death, and I ask God that the shedding of my blood serve the peace of our divided Mexico."
Pope St. John Paul II beatified the Cristero martyrs in 1992 and canonized them on May 21, 2000.
— Catholic News Agency
Watch and learn
"For Greater Glory" chronicles the Cristeros War (1926-1929), a war by the people of Mexico against the atheistic Mexican government. The 2012 movie is available on Netflix and Amazon.
Feast day: May 22
On May 22, the Church celebrates the feast day of St. Rita of Cascia, who the late Pope St. John Paul II called "a disciple of the Crucified One" and an "expert in suffering."
Known in Spain as "La Santa de los impossibiles" ("the saint of the impossible"), St. Rita has become immensely popular throughout the centuries. She is invoked by people in all situations and stations of life, since she had embraced suffering with charity and wrongs with forgiveness in the many trials she experienced in her life: as a wife, widow, a mother surviving the death of her children, and a nun.
Born in 1386 in Roccaparena, Umbria, St. Rita was married at the age of 12 to a violent and ill-tempered husband. He was murdered 18 years later and she forgave his murderers, praying that her twin sons, who had sworn to avenge their father's death, would also forgive. She was granted this grace, and her sons, who died young, died reconciled to God.
The saint heard the call to become a nun in the Augustinian convent at Cascia, but she was refused entry at first. She asked the intercession of Sts. Augustine, Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist and was finally allowed to enter the convent. There she lived the last 40 years of her life in prayer, mortification and service to the people of Cascia.
For the final 15 years of her life, she received a stigmata-like thorn wound in answer to her prayers to be more profoundly conformed to the Passion of Jesus. Rita was bedridden for the last four years of her life, consuming almost nothing except for the Eucharist. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 70 on May 22, 1456.
St. Rita was canonized in 1900 by Pope Leo XIII. On the 100th anniversary of her canonization in 2000, Pope St. John Paul II noted her remarkable qualities as a Christian woman: "Rita interpreted well the 'feminine genius' by living it intensely in both physical and spiritual motherhood."
She is the patron saint of impossible causes, sterility, abuse victims, loneliness, marriage difficulties, parenthood, widows, the sick, bodily ills and wounds.
— Catholic News Agency