Blessed José Torres Padilla

José Torres Padilla was born on 25 August 1811 at San Sebastián de La Gomera in the Canary Islands, the third of four children of a fairly comfortable family, though he lived most of his life in Seville. Baptised six days after birth, he had a happy childhood until both parents died in 1821, after which an aunt took him and his siblings in. He studied at the university of La Laguna in Tenerife from 1827 and left the Canaries in 1833 to continue his studies; unable to land at Seville because of the cholera epidemic, he spent a year at Valencia, where he took his degree in philosophy, and reached Seville the following year, completing philosophy and then theology to the baccalaureate in 1841, supported by a bequest from a Canarian archbishop.

He was ordained on 27 February 1836 by the Cardinal Archbishop of Seville and said his first Mass on 8 March, in years of open persecution of the Church by the liberal government. From 1842 he taught theology, and later ecclesiastical history, discipline and patrology, in the conciliar seminary of Seville. He served as a papal consultor at the First Vatican Council and was made a canon of the cathedral in 1871.