On 14 September 1597, Pedro de Corpa was preparing to celebrate Mass when warriors entered his cabin and attacked him with wooden clubs. He was the first of five Franciscan friars killed in the region.
The five are scheduled to be beatified today at the Savannah Convention Centre in Georgia. Accounts of their deaths connect the attack with their defence of Catholic teaching on the indissolubility of marriage.
Pedro de Corpa was born around 1560. Some sources place his birth in Villalbilla rather than Corpa; both are within the territory of the present-day Diocese of Alcalá de Henares. At the time, the area belonged to the Archdiocese of Toledo.
Ordained in the Franciscan Province of Castile, he left Spain on 21 July 1587 with Fray Antonio de Badajoz to serve as a missionary in the New World. He was assigned to the Tolomato chiefdom, where he founded a mission among the Guale people.
The conflict began when Don Juanillo, a baptised Guale and influential heir to the chiefdom, sought to take a second wife information from his people’s customs. Pedro refused, citing Juanillo’s Christian commitment and marriage to his first wife. Juanillo left the mission and organised a war party.
Pope Francis authorised the decree recognising the five as martyrs on 27 January 2025, accepting that they had been killed out of hatred for the faith. The cause began in 1950, when Father Marion Habig started collecting historical documentation. Because the case dates back centuries and had no firsthand witnesses, it required examination of written sources from the period.
The Diocese of Savannah has also scheduled a historical and artistic exhibition, followed by a thanksgiving Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of St John the Baptist on All Saints’ Day.
