On the Feast Day of the Patron of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers, we remember in our prayers all members of those communities in our Diocese.

Blessed Ceferino Giménez Malla (1864 – 1936) was born in Spain to a Catholic Roma Gypsy family.

During the Spanish Civil War, Ceferino intervened on behalf of a priest who was being arrested – and was himself taken away and imprisoned with around 350 others in a monastery which the authorities had seized to use as a prison.

It is said that when asked if he was carrying a weapon, Ceferino affirmed that he was and showed the soldiers his Rosary! Told that if he handed over his Rosary beads he would be freed, Ceferino refused – and so it happened that on 9 August 1936, Ceferino and others were driven to the cemetery where they would be shot and buried in a mass grave. Holding his Rosary, Ceferino kept on praying and loudly shouting, ‘Long live Christ the King!’

He was beatified by Pope St John Paul II on May 4, 1997. The Holy Father said that Ceferino ‘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’.

Find out more about Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people in our region by visiting the website of the charity Leeds GATE: https://www.leedsgate.co.uk/