Blessed Gaietà Clausellas Ballvé and Antoni Tort Reixachs

The cause concerns the martyrdom of a priest and a layman, both killed in 1936 in the territory of the archdiocese of Barcelona. Gaietà Clausellas Ballvé was born at Sabadell on 5 August 1863, was received into the diocesan seminary of Barcelona at twelve and ordained on 3 May 1888. He served in several pastoral assignments, bearing witness to apostolic dedication, austerity, poverty and humility, and in 1916 became chaplain to the home of the Little Sisters of the Abandoned Elderly at Sabadell, a charge he kept for twenty years. Even during the persecution he said he would never abandon the old people entrusted to him. Taken by militiamen on 14 August 1936, he was shot at dawn the next day.

Antoni Tort Reixachs was born near Barcelona on 28 March 1895, married Maria Josefa Gavín Sagardía in 1917 and was the father of eleven children, a fervent Christian devoted to the Eucharist and to Our Lady. During the persecution he sheltered several religious in his own house knowing the risk to himself and his family. On 1 December 1936 armed militiamen ransacked his home and took him to the convent of Sant Elies, turned into a prison, and shot him near the cemetery of Montcada in the night of 3 to 4 December.