Luis Navarro Origel: The First Cristero

[Stone]

LUIS NAVARRO ORIGEL: The First Cristero
Part I

Theresa Marie Moreau | July 26, 2024


Paying a debt is justice; giving more than one owes is generosity or gratitude; giving everything without expectations is love. Luis Navarro Origel gave everything, without expectations, because he loved God above all things.  - Martin Chowell

ROUNDS OF GUNFIRE exploded around 8 in the morning and continued to blast for the next hour, on September 28, 1926, in the Mexican town of Penjamo.

Without warning, the Cristero War had begun.

The next day, a disheveled and exhausted Luis Navarro Origel suddenly arrived on the doorstep of the home he shared with his wife and their five young children, who clutched onto his legs, chattering happily as he entered.

“We know that the government is coming. What are you going to do?” his terrified wife asked, as he changed into his riding pants and grabbed a pair of binoculars.

“We’re going to the mountains,” he explained, handing her some cash. “Keep this money outside the house, because if it burns down, you’ll have enough to eat the next day.”

At the threshold, she clung to him, their arms wrapped around one another, as the children – Ignacio, Guadalupe, Carmen, Margarita and Rafael – held tightly onto their father.

“When will we see each other again?” she asked.

“Not here, Carmela. We’ll see each other in Heaven,” he answered, with great serenity.

A final kiss. A final gaze. He pulled himself away, mounted his horse and galloped off, kicking up clumps of dirt, as his little family watched from the threshold until they could no longer see him, and never would again, alive.

Although the local telegraph and telephone cables had been cut, severing Penjamo from civilization, that didn’t stop the news from streaking out of that dusty town in the state of Guanajuato to the rest of the nation, from the northern border to the southern border, from the Sierra Madre Occidental to the Sierra Madre Oriental.

“Luis Navarro Origel stood up! Penjamo was taken by Luis Navarro Origel!” Catholics cheered.

In one day, that uprising changed everything after years of brutal tyranny in a reign of terror that smashed Catholics under the bloody fist of the ever-revolving Revolutionary regimes ruled by caudillos, those in the criminal class who ascended to the political class and relied on force and violence to grab and maintain power.

At last, hope. Finally. Finally, someone stood up. That someone: Luis Navarro Origel.

Born on February 15, 1897, to Guadalupe Origel Gutierrez and Bardomiano Navarro Navarro (1859-1919), he was the eighth child of 15, in an industrious, successful family. They lived happily and comfortably in a clean, spacious home, with a central courtyard, overgrown with ferns, flowers and trees, hugged by a loggia echoing with the songs of mockingbirds and canaries. In control of three large farms south of Penjamo – El San Jose de Maravilla, El Guayabo de Origel, El Tepetate de Navarro – the family, alongside hired laborers, worked the fertile fields day in, day out, which resulted in plentiful harvests and overflowing granaries.

A prayerful child, at an early age he studiously pored over and memorized the “Catecismo de los Padres Ripalda y Astete,” in preparation for his First Confession – which he made, prostrate, at the feet of the priest – and First Communion at the age of 6. When ready to launch his academic endeavors, his parents enrolled him in a school founded by Father Crisoforo Guevara. Buoyed at a young age by his intellectual achievements, he expressed a wish to transfer to the minor Seminary of Morelia, in the state of Michoacan, where his older brother, Ignacio, boarded and studied. Prodded for permission, Navarro’s father acquiesced and enrolled his son, at the age of 12, in 1909.

A year after he began attending classes at the seminary, the Mexican Revolution ignited, on November 20, 1910, after the promulgation of the Plan of San Luis Potosi, drafted by Francisco Ignacio Madero Gonzalez (1873-1913), who shot and slashed his way to the presidency, forcing the abdication of longtime dictator President Jose de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915).

Slowly, steadily, the country submerged into a societal bleakness, plunged into the Second Dark Age, a creeping, evil creature that burst forth from its Parisian womb in the Bastille Saint-Antoine during a violent, bloody birth, on July 14, 1789. Thereafter, it spread its perverted ideology – of pro-State, pro-collectivism, anti-Church, anti-individualism – from the Old World to the New World, rampaging in a savage force to annihilate the fruitful civilization that had bloomed from the Greco-Romans and blossomed into Christendom, the foundation of the Western world.

Propagated for decades in Mexico to incite rebellion, chaos and hatred between classes, races, sexes, ideologies and even family members – Socialism found a welcome and comfortable home in Mesoamerican politics.

Any good Revolution worth its weight in blood is usually accompanied with demands of land reform, and Mexico was no different. The Agrarian Mass Movement, initiated by the Plan of Ayala, drafted by Emiliano Zapata Salazar (1879-1919) and first proclaimed on November 28, 1911, agitated for collectivism – the confiscation and nationalization of private businesses and private property, which included Church holdings, as well as haciendas – huge estates owned by wealthy natives, as well as Europeans and their Criollo descendants, all the wealthy without political standing.

To ensure the enactment of land reform, those in power agitated their troops and their countryside comrades, the agraristas: rural Socialists with little or no land who actively worked for and killed for land expropriation and redistribution, because they were promised – lied to – that they would receive that land as reward. Authoritarians whipped up their minions to steal land and valuables from the wealthy, labeled as class and race enemies, just as the Bolsheviks had incited violence toward the kulaks during the dekulakization in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Communists had pushed persecution and death against the landlords in the People’s Republic of China.

Stealing land, livestock, harvests, treasures, depleting goods and resources from wherever they could, the Agrarista Junta – waving red flags, backed by warlords – devastated the countryside, as did the Revolution’s soldiers, uniformed malefactors who marauded from huts to haciendas as they marched along, filling their bellies and their pockets. What they couldn’t carry, they destroyed, burning anything that remained. And anyone deemed an enemy of the ruling Revolutionary faction was often executed on the spot, without proof, without trial.

A week after Navarro turned 16, he was still studying in the minor seminary when Madero – who had ignited the Revolution to oust Diaz – was overthrown and then assassinated three days later, on February 22, 1913, following the coup known as the Ten Tragic Days, headed by Jose Victoriano Huerta Marquez (1850-1916), who, in turn, usurped the presidency; however, he, himself, was overthrown, on July 15, 1914, by an opposing Revolutionary faction led by Jose Venustiano Carranza de la Garza (1859-1920).

With the ascension of Carranza – a rusty tool gripped in the bloodstained fists of the anti-clericals – the Revolution continued upon its path of destruction to force its sociopathic ideology upon the masses, especially Catholics. His military troops – culled from the most vicious criminal segments of society – terrorized the people.

Socialists – the self-proclaimed intellectually elite – categorized the majority of Mexicans – working-poor laborers and farmers – as sub-intelligent, illiterate religious fanatics, who needed to be cleansed of their superstitious beliefs inherited from the European colonizers and oppressors. The Old Man had to be destroyed for the creation of the New Man. Their old ways needed to be violently eradicated by the progressives, those in the vanguard who forced society to progress from Capitalism to a Socialist Utopia, translation: No Place.

To sledgehammer the Church in Mexico, stone by stone, to diminish its influence, the regime gobbled up property – which, not so coincidentally, often increased the wealth and estates of the politically powerful – targeting churches, rectories, convents, monasteries, orphanages, hospitals, clinics, asylums, old age homes and parochial schools.

Eventually, the chaos struck the seminary, in Morelia, where Navarro had thrived intellectually, surpassing all fellow students in philosophy classes, and where he had strived to perfect his interior spiritual life, through self-denial, restraint, daily examination of conscience, daily Communion, meditation – all to fine tune his Will, man’s highest faculty.

In 1914, the Revolutionaries – useful idiots as frenzied mobs under the protection of the Carrancistas – arrived at the seminary and plundered the Catholic institution, where Father Francisco Banegas Galvan (1867-1932) resided as rector. Seminary directors ruled not to resist the violent aggression, and Navarro watched helplessly as the rioters and looters trashed and stole costly furnishings, rare works from the library, and delicate meteorological instruments from the science laboratory.

Ravaged throughout. In one day, treasures – paid for by parishioners and collected over the centuries through great sacrifice – were destroyed.

After the seminary shut down, Navarro had no choice but to return home to Penjamo, to spend the winter holidays with his family, whose residence and agricultural business had also been attacked by locust-like Revolutionaries. The house, ransacked. The fields, destroyed. The granaries, emptied. Complete devastation.

But amidst the darkness, a light.

As Navarro had done before when home from school, he visited a fellow seminarian, Leopoldo Alfaro Madrigal, who lived 35 miles away, in Irapuato. It was then that Navarro – 17 at the time – fell in love with one of his friend’s five sisters: Carmen Alfaro Madrigal, a shy and sweet girl of 14.

Love bloomed.

Upon his return to Morelia to finish his final year of studies, since seminarians had been violently forced out from their residence, he boarded in the home of a Catholic family. His room was large, carpeted, with a padded kneeler, where he could pray his daily rosary. The family had a private chapel with an altar on which every few days he placed flowers, freshly cut from the planters that filled the patio garden. Waking early each morning, he attended Mass and received Communion before classes, which were held in secret wherever they could be conducted discreetly: in huts, open fields, under shade trees.

Because of the anti-clerical sentiment pushed by the Socialists, when not hiding for their lives, priests packed away their cassocks and wore common clothing. But, still, the clergy could not escape violence and death, such as Father David Galvan Bermudez (1881-1915), who was executed on January 30, 1915, after arrested for spiritually tending to soldiers wounded during a battle between opposing Revolutionary factions in Guadalajara.

A young man in the world, Navarro faced the fast-and-free debauchery pushed by the ruling ideology that condemned the sacred bond of traditional marriage as a bourgeois institution for class oppression, and denounced monogamous marital intimacy between a loving couple – taught by the Church to be equal in intimacy and dignity – as an oppressive and feudalistic aspect of a patriarchal, capitalistic society.

Instead, the 18-year-old deliberately chose and welcomed a supernatural, divine love and chastity, expressing his mature desires in a sweet correspondence to Carmen, as the two exchanged love letters filled with heart-felt expressions.

“My Beloved, we have an immense guarantee: We love each other with all our soul, and we have consecrated our love to our Creator, to our most loving Redeemer,” he gushed.

At the completion of his studies with a degree in philosophy, because of his stellar academic performance, his former superiors offered him assistance in any civil career of his choosing.

Unsure about his future, he narrowed down his options to just two choices: to find his vocation for the Church outside the clergy; or to continue his studies in a major seminary to pursue the priesthood, inspired by his older sisters – Margarita, Guadalupe, Concepcion – who had religious vocations and attended the Teresian College of Santa Maria de Guadalupe, in Morelia.

A decision needed to be made.

For clarity, he attended, in October 1916, a retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (born Inigo Lopez de Onaz y Loyola, 1491-1556), directed by Father Luis Maria Martinez y Rodriguez (1881-1956), vice-rector of the seminary. Ignatian retreats are a time of silent discernment. The first half is a lens that closely examines one’s past, followed with a General Confession. The second half focuses on a plan of action for the future. Between conferences, attendees pray and meditate in private, and it is not unusual for a retreatant to undergo an agonizing inner struggle.

On October 26, Navarro endured an intense battle in his soul that completely overwhelmed him, but when the spiritual scuffle subsided, his mind calmed and his being filled with tranquility.

“Today has been one of the worst and one of the happiest days of my life,” he noted in his private writings. “Today, I have taken a decisive step along the path of my life, after a combat that lasted the entire day, with about a thousand indecisions that made me die of anguish.”

The decision that needed to be made, he made, little understanding how he had manifested his fatal destiny. He resolved to sanctify his state in life with marriage, and to fulfill his duties as a son by returning home, to his family, and to continue their work, in the fields, trying to restore that which had been destroyed by the Revolutionaries.

But, the Revolution and its maniacal manipulators continued to thrive in tyranny.

With the new regime came a new constitution. The drafting of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States – illegally imposed by force, on February 5, 1917, by a triumphant military faction – was conceived and written not only to attribute the authority of God to the State, but also to grab more control over the masses and to, finally, completely break the connection the faithful had with the Church.

Carranza’s Liberal Constitutionalist Party, like other Socialist parties – whether Vladimir Lenin’s (1870-1924) Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945) National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Benito Mussolini’s (1883-1945) National Fascist Party, Zedong Mao’s (1893-1976) Chinese Communist Party, – all had one commonality: Individualism must be destroyed, and oneness with the State must be forced.

But Navarro did not let the chaos in the nation ruin his plans for the future. On May 5, 1917, he and Carmen married, in her hometown of Irapuato. For their honeymoon, the newlyweds traveled to Mexico City by train – unreliable at best, dangerous at worst during the Revolution, with frequent de-railings, train robberies, bombed bridges, burned ties, twisted rails, hostile forces and the lack of upkeep on the rolling stock that incurred exploding engines and conked-out cabooses. Their excursion was no different, as the train they were on was attacked by bandits, and Navarro heroically defended the passengers.

As soon as the newly blessed couple arrived in their hotel, Navarro requested of his bride: “I want to ask you – like Tobias and Sarah – that we keep a few days of chastity.”

Blissfully, the few days stretched to 15, and, during that time, their conversations centered around spiritual endeavors and how their marriage would be consecrated, elevated from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the material to the spiritual, from the natural to the supernatural.

Upon their return to Penjamo, they toiled – rising early, pinching pesos – to undo the sacking done by the Revolutionary invaders to the Navarro holdings. But soon the whole family had to seek refuge in Irapuato because of the frequent incursions onto the property by one of the most fearsome and extremely violent Revolutionaries, General Jose Ines Garcia Chavez (1889-1919), a psychopath known as the “Atila of the Bajio” for his crazy cruelty and torture inflicted upon men, women and even young children.

In Irapuato, Navarro started several businesses with his older brother Ignacio. However, a better Catholic than a businessman, all of his attempts fell into failure rather than sail into success, which led to further financial difficulty. But he continued to persevere, always planning to return to Penjamo, which they did, after his father suffered a fatal stroke, around the time of the birth of Navarro’s firstborn, Ignacio, nicknamed “Nachito,” on July 18, 1918.

Undeterred by his failures, somehow, he stumbled upon beekeeping, an untapped venture, and he immersed himself in the project, reading, studying, attempting to entice a queen and encourage nector-filled nests. After failing twice, he finally triumphed and eventually established 200 colonies. After bees, he eschewed traditional modes of farming and adopted modern techniques to successfully cultivate the land and raise livestock, such as chickens, pigs, cows.

Blessed with a happy nature, he savored the joys in life with his young family, but he also had a passion for reading and self-reflection in his spare time at night. His favorites, two great mystics: Saint Teresa of Avila (born Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda Davila y Ahumada, 1515-1582) and Saint John of the Cross (born Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, 1542-91), who – from their graves – guided his ascetic life of strict self-discipline, to follow the Will of God and the precepts of the Church.

But then, yet another political earthquake shook Mexico.

Carranza had attempted to modify the anti-Catholic articles of the 1917 Constitution, but his proposed amendments were vociferously rejected by two up-and-comers: Alvaro Obregon Salido (1880-1928) and Plutarco Elias Calles (born Francisco Plutarco Elias Campuzano, 1877-1945). When Carranza refused to apply the anti-clerical statutes, he was warned that if he continued to ignore them, he would face the consequences. And, on May 21, 1920, at 4 o’clock in the morning, he faced the consequences. While he slept, in Tlaxcalantongo, where he had sought refuge in a safehouse in the Sierra Norte de Puebla Mountains, 30 bullets were fired through the thin walls of his hut, with six finding their target, the president. In addition, eight others died during the assault.

Among Carranza’s bloodied clothing was found a Virgin Mary medal with the following inscription: My Mother Save Me.