Recaredo Centelles Abad was born on 23 May 1904 in Vall de Uxó, in the province of Castellón, Spain, into a humble and deeply Catholic family. Until the age of four he was raised by a wet nurse in the neighboring town of Eslida in the Sierra de Espadán. At seven, in 1911, he received his First Holy Communion in the parish of the Holy Angel in Vall de Uxó. He lost his father in 1916 and, two years later, his elder sister to fever. From childhood he showed an intense priestly vocation, yet the family lacked means to send him to the seminary. When his sister Carmen married the alpargata manufacturer Leopoldo Peñarroja Ribelles, the family's circumstances improved and Leopoldo paid for Recaredo's studies.
He entered the seminary of Tortosa in the academic year 1917–1918, together with Vicente Enrique y Tarancón (later a cardinal and president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference) and Vicente Lores Palau, who became his closest friend and later superior general of the Brotherhood for eighteen years. Cardinal Tarancón later recalled that as a seminarian Recaredo "attracted attention by his piety and observance. He was also very austere. He enjoyed an excellent reputation among superiors and good seminarians." After his mother's death in 1920 he expressed to his superior, Don José María Peris, his desire to join the Brotherhood of Diocesan Worker Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, founded by Blessed Manuel Domingo y Sol. He entered the Brotherhood on 12 August 1928.
Having recovered from intestinal tuberculosis that had brought him near death for half a year, he was ordained a priest on 25 May 1929 and celebrated his first Mass in his native parish of the Holy Angel on 16 June 1929. Within the Brotherhood he served as prefect of discipline for Latin students at the seminary of Tarragona (1928–1930). In 1932 he obtained the doctorate in theology. From 1932 to 1935 he was vice-rector of the Minor Seminary of Saint Joseph in Tortosa and diocesan counselor for catechesis; in 1935 he was named rector of that seminary, a charge he held until the outbreak of the Civil War.
On 18 July 1936, when the war began, he was preaching a retreat to the seminarians. On 20 July he sent them home and, stricken with nephritis, was admitted to hospital. After recovery he went to live with his sister in Vall de Uxó. There he could exercise his priesthood only rarely—once to give Communion to the nuns and once to baptize his niece. On 2 October 1936 he read to his sister-in-law the last letter of her husband, Recaredo's brother, who had been shot that same day.
On the night of 24–25 October 1936, militiamen, acting on orders of local Republican leaders, came to the house for Recaredo and his brother-in-law Leopoldo Peñarroja, who was machine-gunned on the spot. Recaredo, another priest, and two lay persons were taken by car to the cemetery of Nules and shot. The first bullet wounded but did not kill him. He asked to be turned so that he might bless his executioners; they gave him the coup de grâce while he was blessing them. The bodies were thrown into a ditch beside the cemetery and left unburied until the end of the war in 1939. When exhumed, his body was found incorrupt. After successive burials it has been venerated since 2012 in the parish of the Holy Guardian Angel in Vall de Uxó.
He lived the spirituality of the Brotherhood: formation of priests, the spirit of reparation, and devotion to the Sacred Heart. A private notebook of spiritual notes records his repeated offering of himself as a victim to God in reparation for the sins of the world and his interior acceptance of martyrdom. He was beatified in Rome by Pope John Paul II on 1 October 1995 together with Blessed Pedro Ruiz de los Paños y Ángel and seven other Worker Priest martyrs. His liturgical memorial is 25 October, the day of his martyrdom.
May Blessed Recaredo Centelles Abad obtain for us the grace of generous reparation and the courage to bless those who wrong us, and let us imitate today his fidelity to the priesthood and his love for the Sacred Heart.
