The Martyrs of Valencia

Spanish leftest supporters of the Republic carry
out the symbolic execution of
the Sacred Heart .

Blessed Jose Aparicio Sanz
and 232 companions in Martydom.

Feast: 22 September

Father Jose Aparicio Sanz served as archpriest in his native village of Enguera, Spain, in the archdiocese of Valencia. As the Spanish Civil War continued in the autumn of 1936, forces of the anti-Catholic Popular Front arrested Father Aparicio and imprisoned him together with fourteen other diocesan priests in a jail at Mislata. From October 5 through Christmas of that year, the incarcerated priests spent their time repeatedly praying the rosary and reciting other devotional prayers. On December 29, 1936, the forty-three-year-old Father Aparicio was brought to a location known as Picadero de Paterna to be executed along with approximately thirty other prisoners. Among the others put to death for the Catholic faith was the thirty-three-year-old curate of Father Aparicio’s parish of Enguera, Father Enrique Juan Requena. Another of the martyrs was Jose Perpina Nacher, a twenty-five-year-old married layman who had worked as a lawyer and a telegraph operator.