Ceferino Giménez Malla

Ceferino Giménez Malla

Born	26 August 1861, Benavent de Segrià, Spain
Died	2 August 1936, Barbastro, Spain
State of life	Married lay faithful; martyr
Religious institute	Third Order of Saint Francis
Ecclesial status	Blessed and martyr; beatified on 4 May 1997
Recognition	Martyrdom recognized; beatification in 1997

Ceferino Giménez Malla was a Spanish Romani husband, businessman, Franciscan tertiary, catechist, and martyr, killed during the religious persecution of the Spanish Civil War.

Overview

Ceferino Giménez Malla (also known as El Pelé, "the Strong One", or "the Brave One"; 26 August 1861 – 9 August 1936) was a Spanish Romani Catholic catechist and activist. A victim of the Republican militias during the Spanish Civil War, Giménez Malla was beatified on 4 May 1997, now his feast day. He is the patron of Romani people.

Life

Origins and formation

Ceferino Giménez Malla, widely known as El Pelé, was born into a Romani family and spent part of his youth traveling in Aragón and Catalonia. He supported himself through livestock trading and became known in Barbastro for commercial honesty and for mediating disputes. His union with Teresa Jiménez Castro was regularized as a Catholic marriage in 1912; the couple had no children but cared for a niece and extended generous help to poorer relatives and neighbors.

Vocation and service

Giménez Malla's mature faith centered on the Eucharist, the Rosary, Scripture taught through catechesis, and concrete almsgiving. He joined the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and the Franciscan Third Order, served as a catechist, participated in nocturnal adoration, and cultivated friendships across social divisions. His Romani identity was not erased by Catholic belonging: his life joined both without reducing either to an exotic feature of a later cause.

Christian witness

In July 1936, amid revolutionary violence at the start of the Spanish Civil War, Giménez Malla intervened when militiamen arrested a young priest. He too was detained, and a Rosary found on him became evidence of the faith he refused to conceal. He remained in custody with clergy and other Catholics, encouraged fellow prisoners to pray, and was shot near Barbastro in the early hours of 2 August.

The decree and beatification identify his death as martyrdom in hatred of the faith, not merely as a casualty of political disorder. His witness therefore includes both the final refusal to abandon prayer and the long formation that made it possible: marriage, work, reconciliation, service, and sacramental life. He is especially significant as the first Romani Catholic formally beatified, without becoming a token substitute for the many histories of Romani Christians.

Ecclesial recognition

Cause and present status

After investigation of his life and death, the Holy See recognized Giménez Malla as a martyr, for whom a miracle was not required before beatification. Saint John Paul II beatified him in Saint Peter's Square on 4 May 1997 and explicitly praised the harmony between his Romani identity and his Catholic faith. His exact canonical status is Blessed and martyr; he has not been canonized.

Liturgical and devotional scope

Beatification authorizes a limited public cult under the apostolic letter and the proper calendars that have received approval. His memorial is kept on 2 August in authorized contexts, particularly among communities for whom he is an approved patron and witness. This permission is not the universal public veneration that follows canonization, and accounts of local affection should not invent a broader liturgical rank.

Biography

Giménez Malla was born to Juan Jiménez and Josefa Malla, a Catholic Romani family, in either Benavent de Segriá, Lleida or in Alcolea de Cinca, Spain. Sources differ as to whether the year was 1861 or 1865. He was baptized in Fraga, Huesca Province. His father was a cattle-trader. The family usually waited out the winter on farms in places farmers set aside for them, or else they rented a cottage for a few months. Ceferino often went hungry. Accompanying his father, he became conversant in Catalan as well as Romany. Around 1880 his father abandoned the family and they went to Barbastro, where his uncle taught Ceferino to weave wicker baskets. About the age of twenty, he wed Teresa Jiménez Castro according to a traditional Roma ceremony. They were happily married for forty years. They had no children, but looked after his younger brothers and sisters. Around 1909 they adopted Teresa's orphaned niece, Pepita. In 1912, Giménez Malla and his wife Teresa solemnized their marriage in a Catholic ceremony, and bought a house in the Huescan town of Barbastro. Teresa died in 1922.

Known for his honesty, Ceferino became something of a leader in the Roma community of Barbastro and the surrounding area. People would seek him out for advice, and to mediate family quarrels. He also resolved disputes between Romani and Spanish people.

One day a local landowner, suffering from tuberculosis, passed out on the street. Heedless of the danger of contagion, Malla hoisted the man on his shoulders and carried him home. The grateful family rewarded him with a sum sufficient to start a business buying and selling surplus mules which the French army no longer needed after World War I. Tools with which he cleaned horseshoes and iron shoes for mules and donkeys were donated by the son of Ceferino's friend, Ferruchón, to the Museum of Martyrs in Barbastro. Ceferino is said to have often lent money to poor Roma, and to have also allowed them to remove from the stables the animals they liked most. They could pay their debts when they sold them or at the end of their seasonal work when they could afford to do so. He reportedly also used to feed poor children.

Giménez Malla is a described as a pleasant, good-natured, tall, thin man carefully dressed and distinguished looking. Although illiterate, after his wife died, Giménez Malla began a career as a catechist under the guidance of a priest-teacher, Don Nicholas Santos de Otto, teaching both Romani and Spanish children. He had a gift for catechizing children by telling them stories. He became a member of the Secular Franciscan Order, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul and, participated in Thursday night Eucharistic Adoration.

In July 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Giménez Malla tried to defend a Catholic priest from Republican militiamen. They both were arrested and imprisoned in a former Capuchin monastery, converted into a wartime prison. An acquaintance advised him that he would probably be released if he gave up his rosary, but he refused. A Romani legend has it that the soldiers asked him if he had weapons, and that he answered: "Yes, and here it is", while displaying his rosary. On August 9, Giménez Malla and others were taken by truck to a cemetery and shot. He reportedly died holding the rosary in his hands, and shouting: "Long live Christ the King!". He was buried in a mass grave; his body has never been found.

Veneration

On 4 May 1997, Ceferino Giménez Malla was beatified by Pope John Paul II who said that Malla "knew how to sow harmony and solidarity among his own, also mediating conflicts that sometimes blur the relationship between non-Roma and Roma, showing Christ's love knows no boundaries of race or culture."

Approximately 3,000 Roma attended the beatification ceremony in Rome, some travelling from as far away as Slovakia and Brazil. He is the first Roma beatified.

External links

• Homily for Beatification of Five Servants of Gods on Vatican site
• Bl. Ceferino Jimenez, by Father Robert F. McNamara
• Saints. Blessed Ceferino Giménez Malla
• Biographies of Blesseds - 1997: Cerefino Giménez Malla
• Beato Ceferino Giménez Malla in Spanish
• San Ceferino Giménez Malla Archived 2007-10-17 at the Wayback Machine in Spanish

Further reading

• Agasso, Domenico. "Beato Zeffirino (Ceferino) Gimenez Malla", Famiglia Christiani in Italian (translation available).