St. José Gabriel del Rosario Brochero (16 March 1840 – 26 January 1914), known across Argentina as the cura gaucho, the gaucho priest, was a diocesan priest of Córdoba who served the Valle de Traslasierra for close to forty years, crossing the Sierras Grandes on a mule to reach people who had neither roads nor schools. He caught leprosy from the sick he lived among and died deaf and almost blind. Canonized on 16 October 2016, he was the first person canonized who was both born and died in Argentina. His body rests in the parish church of Villa Cura Brochero, the town that took his name two years after his death.
Life
He was born on 16 March 1840 at Carreta Quemada, a paraje a few leagues from Villa Santa Rosa in the Río Primero department of Córdoba province, and was baptized the next day. He was the fourth of ten children of Ignacio Brochero and Petrona Dávila; two of his sisters became religious. He entered the seminary college of Our Lady of Loreto in Córdoba on 5 March 1856, joined the Third Order of St Dominic on 26 August 1866, and was ordained priest on 4 November 1866, at twenty-six, by Bishop José Vicente Ramírez de Arellano. His first Mass was on 10 December of that year. He served at the cathedral of Córdoba, was prefect of studies at the major seminary, and took the title of Master of Philosophy on 12 November 1869. In the cholera epidemic that killed more than four thousand people in Córdoba in 1867 he went from the sick to the dying across city and countryside. On 18 November 1869 he was made priest of the curato of San Alberto, today the Valle de Traslasierra: 4,336 square kilometres of valleys and hills with a little over ten thousand people living scattered through it, without roads and without schools, shut off from the city by the Sierras Grandes above two thousand metres. He reached San Pedro after three days on muleback and settled, by his own choice, at Villa del Tránsito. What the valley lacked, he built. Every year he led parties of his parishioners — on occasion as many as a thousand — on horseback some two hundred kilometres over the mountains to Córdoba to make the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius; to spare them the journey he raised the Casa de Ejercicios Espirituales de Traslasierra, begun in 1875 and in use from 1877, and put it in the care of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Hermanas Esclavas del Corazón de Jesús). In 1880 he blessed a school for girls and gave it to the same sisters. He opened sixty-six local roads with his own parishioners, built stone bridges, aqueducts, canals and dykes, obtained a postal station and a telegraph, and brought the water of the Panaholma river down to the town. He finished or built the churches of San Pedro, San Vicente, Las Rosas, Ciénaga de Allende and Panaholma, the last of them his final work, and rebuilt the church of Villa del Tránsito in 1902 after a tornado took its roof. He rode a mule called Malacara, and later a horse. With his health broken he accepted a canonry at the cathedral of Córdoba in 1898, and in 1902 asked to return to his parish. Leprosy, contracted from living among the sick and sharing the mate gourd with them, left him deaf and nearly blind. He gave up the parish formally on 5 February 1908 and went to his sisters at Villa Santa Rosa; in 1912 he came back to Villa del Tránsito at his parishioners' asking, and he died there on 26 January 1914, aged seventy-three, in the house that is now the Museo Brocheriano. His last words, in the country speech he never left behind, were: "Now I have everything ready for the journey." On 17 March 1967 the Holy See authorised his cause to open in the archdiocese of Córdoba rather than in the diocese of Cruz del Eje where he had died. Sixty-one witnesses were heard between 1968 and 1974, fifty-three of them people who had known him. He was declared venerable on 19 April 2004. The recovery of Nicolás Flores, a Córdoba boy left near death by a road accident, was recognised as a miracle through his intercession, and he was beatified at Villa Cura Brochero on 14 September 2013, in a ceremony presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato before some 150,000 to 200,000 people, about eighty bishops and some 1,200 priests. A second recovery, that of Camila Brusotti of San Juan, opened the way to his canonization in St Peter's Square, Rome, on 16 October 2016.
Patronage
- The province of Córdoba — declared unanimously by the Córdoba Legislature in December 2023, beside Our Lady of the Rosary of the Miracle and St Jerome
- The Argentine clergy
Feast Day
16 March — the day of his birth, fixed as his feast at the beatification of 2013, and also the patronal feast of the town of Villa Cura Brochero. Until then he was kept on 26 January, the day of his death; that day is still marked at the shrine, and each of the two dates draws a semana brocheriana of Masses, processions and pilgrimages in the town.
Relics
His body lay for fifty-nine years in a deep grave in the middle of the old chapel, sealed with brick and covered with lime for fear of the leprosy. The grave was opened on 27 January 1973 for the canonical process, before the bishop of Cruz del Eje, Enrique Pechuán Marín, a group of sisters, a local doctor and neighbours; the body was found largely intact. The preserved brain matter and the other soft remains were put into glass jars, the skull and the rest of the bones into an urn of algarrobo, the hard dark carob wood of the Traslasierra. Both were set in a niche in the north wall of the chapel, and in 1994 moved to their present place in the west wall of the parish church, where pilgrims pray before the urn and write what they ask and what they thank in notebooks kept beside it.
- Villa Cura Brochero, Córdoba — the urn of bones and the jar holding the brain, in the wall of the Shrine of Our Lady of the Transit
- Predio La Providencia, Villa Cura Brochero — a large reliquary of algarrobo showing him on horseback, made for the beatification of 14 September 2013 and holding a jar of brain matter, kept since January 2017 in the chapel built in his honour beside the sculpture park
- Reliquaries on pilgrimage — small bones of his left hand were placed in several reliquaries; one of them travels the dioceses of Argentina, and others have been given away abroad
Iconography
He is shown as he rode: a wide-brimmed sombrero and a poncho over the cassock, on his mule, a mate gourd in his hand — the figure that made him an emblem of Argentine popular devotion. On his rounds he carried an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, his Mass kit and a prayer book. The reliquary made for his beatification shows him on horseback, with the mountain path and the mule set there so that children would ask what they were for.
Sources
José Gabriel Brochero — the fullest account of his life, his works and the course of his cause, with its own sources named. (Wikipedia, Spanish) Jose Gabriel del Rosario Brochero — the life and the cause in English, and the mule, sombrero and poncho he travelled in. (Wikipedia) Cronología de su Causa — the shrine's own chronology of the cause, step by step to the canonization. (Santuario Santo Cura Brochero) Las reliquias del Santo Cura Brochero recorrerán la provincia — the 1973 exhumation, the urn and the jars, the 1994 move, and the hand relics that travel. (Los Andes) ¿Furta Sacra? La disputa por las reliquias corporales del santo cura Brochero — a study of his relics and of the devotion around them. (Redalyc) Reliquias, cuerpos y devoción en torno al santo cura Brochero — the algarrobo urn described by the parish priest of 1994, the beatification reliquary, and the two semanas brocherianas. (Etnografías Contemporáneas, UNSAM) Algunas reliquias de Brochero serán depositadas en una artesanía de algarrobo — the making of the beatification reliquary and what it holds. (Radio María Argentina) Villa Cura Brochero (Argentina) — the December 2023 declaration of the saint as patron of the province of Córdoba. (Viajá con Gus) Vida del Santo Cura Brochero y su trascendencia para la Iglesia — names him patron of the Argentine clergy. (ACI Prensa)
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