20th century
Feast: February 10
A fourteen-year-old boy whose captors sliced the soles of his feet and forced him to walk on salt to the cemetery where they shot him — he shouted 'Viva Cristo Rey!' with every step.
Jose Sanchez del Rio was thirteen when the Cristero War broke out and he begged his mother to let him join the Catholic rebels fighting against Mexico's anti-clerical government. She refused at first. He went anyway, serving as a flag bearer for the Cristero forces. In February 1928, he was captured by government troops during a battle near Cotija. They offered him freedom if he would renounce his faith. He refused. They locked him in the sacristy of a church that had been converted into a chicken coop — a deliberate humiliation. They forced him to watch the hanging of another Cristero prisoner. They told him that would be next. He wrote a letter to his mother from his cell: 'Give yourself courage and send me your blessing along with that of my father. Greet everyone for me for the last time, and receive the heart of your son, who loves you so much and wanted to see you before dying.' On February 10, 1928, they cut the soles of his feet and forced him to walk barefoot on salt and over rough ground to the cemetery. He screamed in pain but kept shouting 'Viva Cristo Rey!' at every step. At the cemetery, they stabbed him repeatedly with bayonets and demanded he renounce Christ. He would not. They shot him. He was fourteen.