Blessed Manuel Lozano Garrido

Manuel Lozano Garrido was born at Linares in the diocese of Jaén in 1920, the fifth of eight children of a genuinely religious and reasonably comfortable family. His father's early death was the first of a long series of trials. His childhood passed under his maternal grandfather's guidance in a steady rhythm of study, play, catechesis and the sacraments, and he joined Catholic Action as an aspirant. His adolescence closed with the killing of his elder brother in the religious persecution that preceded and accompanied the Spanish Civil War, and he himself knew humiliation, the breaking up of his family and imprisonment for religious reasons. Even so he kept a confident heart, carrying the Eucharist to prisoners like a new Tarcisius and never showing rancour, not even when called up at seventeen.

Towards the end of the war the first rheumatic symptoms appeared that would become the cross of his life. In the post-war years he combined Catholic Action with an extraordinary output of journalism and literature, putting his culture at the service of a Christian vision of life and proposing the social doctrine of the Church as the sure guide to civic problems.