St. Manuel González García

Who they were

Manuel González was a young Sevillian priest sent in 1902 to preach a mission at Palomares del Río, and what he found there named his life: a church filthy and deserted, and a tabernacle so neglected that he knelt before it in the dust and understood his vocation in a single interior sentence. Someone has to keep him company.

The Bishop of the Abandoned Tabernacle, as the Church now titles him, built everything from that kneeling: parish renewal in Huelva that turned an indifferent town practising again, the Eucharistic reparation works and the Missionaries of Nazareth he founded, and books of a warm, practical devotion still in print. Then the cost. As Bishop of Málaga in 1931 his residence was burned in the anticlerical violence, and he governed his diocese from exile, never permitted to return, finishing his days as Bishop of Palencia. His tomb, at his own instruction, sits beside a tabernacle, with an epitaph telling whoever reads it to ask the Lord there for whatever they need. He was canonized in 2016.

Why people turn to St. Manuel González García

Adorers, with St. Peter Julian Eymard. Priests and ministers serving parishes that feel abandoned, for whom Palomares is an ordinary Monday. And anyone who stops in at a church on a lunch break for no reason they can explain.

How to ask their intercession

His one instruction: go where the Lord is kept, and keep company. Fifteen minutes, or one decade, and no agenda required.