On centenary of Cristero War, bishop invites Catholics to ‘defend your faith by knowing it better’

Paul's statement in 2 Timothy 3:12 is categorical and universal — not 'some who desire godly life' but 'all.' It is a direct-principle assertion: godliness and persecution are inseparable in a fallen world. The verse was written to Timothy as he faced pressure from a hostile culture, but its scope is covenantal and cross-generational.

The plain grammatical sense leaves no room for the notion that persecution is an anomaly or a failure of strategy. It is the predictable cost of the godly life.

The Cristero War was not an accident of Mexican politics; according to this principle it was the inevitable collision between a state determined to expunge God from public life and a Church determined to worship openly. The centenary memorial, and the bishop's call to deeper faith-formation, implicitly acknowledge that the same collision is always latent — and that the best preparation is to know, with Paul and the Cristeros, what one is willing to die for.

The fifth seal vision in Revelation presents a heavenly reality: the martyrs are held, honored, and told that their blood-witness is part of a deliberate, numbered completion ordained by God — not a tragedy without meaning. John's original hearers, under Domitian's persecution, received this as assurance that martyrdom serves a divine economy.

The phrase 'until the number of their fellow servants… should be complete' implies that martyrdom is a continuing feature of church history up to the consummation — not a closed chapter of early Christianity.

The Cristero dead are among those 'slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne.' The centenary does not merely recall the past; in Revelation's framework it reminds the living Church that the total number of martyrs is not yet complete, and that fidelity — the very fidelity the bishop calls Catholics to strengthen through knowledge — is the calling of every generation until the Lord returns.

Psalm 116 is a personal hymn of deliverance, but verse 15 extends beyond the individual to a covenantal declaration about how God regards the death of those who belong to him. 'Precious' (yaqar) in Hebrew carries the sense of costly, of high worth — God does not view the martyrdom of His people as waste.

This is not a prediction but a revealed disposition of God — one that directly addresses how the Church should interpret, remember, and proclaim the deaths of those who died for faith.

A centenary commemoration risks becoming hollow sentiment unless it is grounded in the conviction that God Himself assigns infinite weight to what was suffered. The bishop's invitation — to honor the Cristero dead by knowing the faith they died for — is pastorally sound precisely because it treats their deaths as precious in the same way God does: not as curiosities of history, but as costly seed that obligates the living to bear fruit.