Ismael Escrihuela Esteve was born on 20 May 1902 at Tavernes de la Valldigna, in the region of Valencia, Spain, into a family in which the faith was not an ornament but the very air of the house. He was sent to the school of the Sisters of Christian Doctrine, and from childhood he took his place, evening after evening, in the public recitation of the Holy Rosary. What was planted in him then never withered: the piety of the child became the settled conviction of the man.
He grew up to work the land as a farmer, and he married Josefa Grau. God gave them three children — Ismael, Josefa and José. The duties of a working husband and father did not shrink his interior life; they enlarged it. He received Holy Communion every day. He belonged to several pious associations, and above all to Catholic Action, in which he served as a delegate and formator of the young aspirants, giving to boys the same faith that the Sisters and his own parents had given to him. Once a month he mounted his bicycle and rode to Gandía to keep watch with the Nocturnal Adoration, spending the night before the Blessed Sacrament while his town slept.
He wore a small crucifix in the lapel of his jacket, and he would not take it off. In an atmosphere increasingly hostile to religion, this cost him something: children and grown men alike mocked him in the street and called him "the little soldier of Christ." He accepted the nickname without shame, and the taunt became his title of honour; his neighbours remembered him by it, and it has followed him into the calendar of the blessed. He knew where such open profession was leading. In a written statement dated 7 August 1936 he recalled the threats already made against him: "Already in 1936, enraged beyond measure, they promised me that, although they recognized that I had done nothing wrong, as soon as they won the elections, I would be executed like the priests and friars."
The revolution came in the summer of 1936. On 21 July a group of militiamen of the Popular Front arrested him, and he was held for several days in the town hall of Tavernes. There his captors amused themselves by putting obscene pictures before him; he tore them up. Purity and reverence were not negotiable, even in the hands of men who could kill him. He was then transferred to the prison of San Miguel de los Reyes in Valencia, crowded with priests, religious and lay Catholics. In that jail Ismael joined the clandestine processions of the Blessed Sacrament which the imprisoned religious secretly organized — the Eucharist he had adored by night at Gandía now carried in secret through a prison, and he walking behind it as he had always walked, a soldier in the ranks of Christ.
His wife tried to see him and found the way barred with difficulty and humiliation. His last recorded words to her lifted her eyes above the whole tragedy: "Do not suffer more; we will see each other in glory." On 8 September 1936, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose Rosary he had prayed since childhood, he was taken to the Picadero de Paterna outside Valencia and shot for his fidelity to Christ and to the Catholic faith. He was thirty-four years old, a farmer, a husband and a father of three.
His reputation for holiness endured among his people. Pope John Paul II recognized the martyrdom by decree on 18 December 2000, and on 11 March 2001 beatified him in Rome within the great group of Blessed Joseph Aparicio Sanz and 232 companions, martyrs of Valencia. His feast is kept on 8 September, the day of his death. He remains a model for laypeople: a man of the fields who sanctified marriage, work and ordinary duty by the Eucharist, the Rosary and the apostolate, and who in the end confessed with his blood the Christ whose small cross he had refused to remove from his coat.
May Blessed Ismael Escrihuela Esteve obtain for us the courage to wear our faith without disguise, and let us today make one act of open, unembarrassed devotion — a Rosary, a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, a sign of the cross before the world — for love of the Lord he called glory.
