Saints Cristóbal, Antonio and Juan of Tlaxcala

Saints Cristóbal, Antonio and Juan were boys of the Tlaxcalan people, pupils of the first Franciscans. They were killed for their faith in 1527 and 1529, when they were in their early teens. Historians of the Mexican Church regard them as the first martyrs of all the Americas. The Church commemorates them on September 23.

The Franciscans arrived in Mexico in 1524, a few years after the Spanish conquest, and opened a school in Tlaxcala for the sons of the nobility. Following the missionary methods of the time, they destroyed statues of the gods and fought against human sacrifice, polygamy, and drunkenness. Little is known about the boys; the oldest account of their deaths was written in 1539 by the Franciscan Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía.

Cristóbal was born in 1514 or 1515 in Atlihuetzía, the favorite son and heir of Acxotécatl, one of the lords of Tlaxcala. Following his brothers’ example, he began to attend the Franciscan school and asked for baptism of his own accord. He urged his father to give up idols and drunkenness, and when his father would not listen, he smashed the statues of the gods in the house. Incited by servants and by one of his wives, the father decided to kill him.

In 1527, on the pretext of a family feast, he called his sons home. He beat Cristóbal with a club, breaking his arms and legs, and threw him into the fire. The boy called on God and the Virgin Mary for help. After a night of suffering, in the morning he asked for his father, forgave him, and died, at about thirteen years of age. The father buried him secretly in the house and soon afterward also had the boy’s mother, who had tried to defend him, killed. According to Motolinía, the father was later hanged on the sentence of a Spanish judge.

Antonio and Juan were born around 1516 or 1517 in Tizatlán, near Tlaxcala. Antonio was the grandson and heir of a local ruler, and Juan, a boy of humble birth, was his servant. In 1529, when the Dominican Bernardino Minaya was looking for interpreters for a mission to Oaxaca, both of them volunteered. Warned that they might be killed, they answered that they were ready to give their lives for God, like the apostles Peter, Paul, and Bartholomew.

In Tepeaca the boys helped the missionaries gather statues of the gods from the houses to be destroyed, and then they went on alone to Cuauhtinchán. While Antonio was going into the houses and Juan was waiting at the door, local men came with clubs and killed Juan. Antonio ran out, cried that his companion was innocent, since it was he who was taking the idols, and was killed in the same way. According to Motolinía, nobles of the area had agreed to kill them for destroying the idols; the Church recognized that they were killed out of hatred for the faith.

John Paul II beatified them on May 6, 1990, in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, together with Juan Diego, and called them an example of how evangelization is the task of the whole People of God, not excluding children. At the request of the Mexican Episcopal Conference, Pope Francis canonized them on October 15, 2017, without the miracle normally required. They are patrons of Mexican youth.