Blessed Moisés Lira Serafín

Moisés Lira Serafín was born on 16 September 1893 in the quarter of Tlatempa in the municipality of Zacatlán, Puebla, in the years of Porfirio Díaz's political decline. He was the youngest of the seven children of a simple and respected family; his father was a schoolmaster who also worked the land, and his mother, Juliana Serafín, kept the house. He was baptised two days after his birth in the parish church of San Pedro at Zacatlán. His childhood was calm and lived in harmony with his parents and relatives until his mother's death on 14 September 1898, shortly after his fifth birthday. That loss, and the repeated separations from those he loved, left him with an emotional instability that sometimes showed itself in rebellion.

After his mother died he began an itinerant life beside his father, who followed the successive appointments of the parish priest until 1908, the first move taking the family from Tlatempa to Amozoc. He remained at Amozoc until he was twelve, receiving his First Communion there and serving at the parish altar. In 1934 he founded the Missionaries of Charity of Mary Immaculate.