In their series of biographies for young people entitled “Portraits in Faith and Freedom”, Bethlehem Books, a small publishing house in North Dakota dedicated to reviving for youthful readers out of print books of particular merit, has recently republished Padre Pro: Mexican Hero by Fanchon Royer. It will introduce this most attractive of men, beatified by John Paul II in 1988, to a new readership.
There are some saints, such as Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati and Blessed Miguel Pro SJ (1891-1927), whose exuberance and joy leap from the pages when one reads about them. They remind us that holy men and women are not models of conventional piety but people of excess; they cannot follow Christ by slow degrees but have to run headlong towards him. In the case of Miguel Pro, the oldest son of a large Mexican family, close-knit, happy and devout, his high spirits, impulsivity and jokes did not stop when, aged 20, he entered the Jesuit novitiate. They merely took on a new form, especially when he returned to his own country after a long period of study in Europe.
