Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, will beatify this Saturday, October 17, at eleven in the morning, in the cathedral of Ibiza, Juan Torres Torres and nineteen companions, diocesan priests murdered out of hatred for the faith between August and September 1936 in the territory of the Diocese of Ibiza. Semeraro will preside on behalf of Leo XIV, who authorized on June 18 the promulgation of the decree recognizing their martyrdom. According to the Diocese, it will be the first beatification celebrated in the Balearic Islands.
The diocese opens the vigil today, Friday, with a pilgrimage to the places where they died. The bishop, Vicent Ribas, will pray a responsory at ten in the morning at the old castle of Dalt Vila, now a parador; then at Sa Carrossa and at La Savina, in Formentera; at seven in the evening, in the square of the church of Sant Carles, and at eight-thirty he will preside over Vespers in the church of Santa Eulària. On Sunday the 18th there will be a Mass of thanksgiving in the cathedral, on the 24th and 25th of October in all the parishes, and on November 6 the liturgical feast of the new blesseds will be celebrated for the first time.
The twenty priests were between 24 and 77 years old and died in just over five weeks, between August 7 and September 13, 1936. The first was the one who gives his name to the cause: Juan Torres Torres, ordained on June 6 of that year, who was killed in La Savina on August 7 before his body was thrown into the sea. He was 24 years old. The oldest of the group, José Tur Bennassar, had been ordained in 1884, so half a century separates the two ordinations. The day after Torres’s death, the parish priest of Sant Carles, Antonio Tur Costa, and his father were shot; according to the diocese, his brother was also killed later in Santa Eulària, simply for being his brother. Seventeen of the twenty were murdered in the castle of Dalt Vila on September 13, the date on which the diocese remembers them every year.
Of another of them, Antonio Roig Guasch, parish priest of Sant Francesc Xavier, in Formentera, the bishop recounted in June, as reported by Periódico de Ibiza, that he was taken to Ibiza, ordered to renounce the faith and blaspheme, and that he died in Sa Carrossa shouting “¡Viva Cristo Rey!”. Ribas then summarized the meaning of the cause in a phrase: “they died only for reasons of faith.” Three of the future blesseds, Antonio Cardona Vingut, José Ramón Escandell and Mariano Roig Marí, appear in the books of the Confraternity of the Most Holy Christ of the Cemetery, founded in 1890. Its president, María de las Nieves Jiménez Bonet, told the same newspaper that it is “an enormous joy that three people who were part of our confraternity are going to be beatified.”
The cause was opened by Bishop Vicente Juan Segura on November 23, 2008. The diocesan phase was closed on June 12, 2015 and Rome recognized its validity on January 27, 2017. The historical consultants approved the Positio on January 28, 2025, the theologians gave their favorable vote a year later and the cardinals and bishops of the Dicastery issued their judgment on June 16, 2026, two days before the Pope’s approval. The process began with twenty-one names. The Dicastery excluded Francisco Planells Tur because, as the diocese explained, the evidence gathered did not allow the necessary moral certainty to be reached. The diocese is also studying the cases of eleven lay people and a group of young people from Catholic Action at the parish of Sant Jordi.
The beatification comes two days after the Office for the Causes of Saints of the Episcopal Conference updated its data on the religious persecution of the 1930s: according to El Debate, there are 2,404 blesseds, 11 saints and 3,040 in process, for a total of 5,455, not counting cases still under study in the dioceses or those of people who never had an open cause. Ninety years later, these twenty priests will be declared blesseds in the cathedral of the diocese they served, and not in Rome.
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