Religious Figure. Toribio Romo González, known as Saint Toribio Romo was a Mexican Catholic priest and martyr who was killed during the anti-clerical persecutions of the Cristero War. Though initially countered by his parents, in 1912, at age thirteen, he entered the Auxiliary Seminary of San Juan de los Lagos, before transferring to the Major Diocesan Seminary of Guadalajara in 1920. He was created a deacon on September 22, 1922, and ordained a priest a few months later, on December 23, at the age of twenty-two, after being granted a dispensation due to his exceedingly young age. He celebrated his first public mass on January 5, 1923. Starting in November 1926, after a revolt in the town of Cuquío against the anti-clerical persecutions of Mexican president Plutarco Elías Calles, he was forced to take up an itinerant lifestyle along with Justino Orona, the parish priest of Cuquío. After relocating almost a dozen times, his final residence was the rural settlement of Agua Caliente, in the outskirts of the town of Tequila, where he was sent to hide and was offered refuge by a local landowner. There, he was joined by his brother and sister, and he continued to secretly carry out his priestly ministry from an abandoned distillery and by visiting parishioners in the town of Tequila by night. On Friday, February 24, 1928, he spent his day organizing the parish registry. Two days before he had sent his brother away to safety. Toribio finished his work in the early hours of February 25 and went to bed. An hour later, government troops arrived and broke into the bedroom where he was sleeping. One of the soldiers reportedly shouted: "Here is the priest, kill him!" He said, "Here I am, but do not kill me." Another soldier, however, fired, and Toribio rose from his bed and took a few steps before a second bullet caused him to fall into the arms of his sister, who cried in a loud voice: "Courage, Father Toribio...merciful Christ, receive him! Long live Christ the King!." Beatified and later canonized by Pope John Paul II along with 24 other saints and martyrs of the Cristero War, he is popularly venerated in Mexico and among Mexican immigrants, particularly for his reported miraculous appearances to migrants seeking to cross the Mexico–United States border.