John of Nepomuk is a name not often heard these days; Wenceslaus IV, even more so. John was a Bohemian priest of the 14th century. As the story goes, he was the confessor to the queen, Wenceslaus's wife. When John refused to reveal information divulged to him during the sacrament of confession, the king had him drowned in the river Vltava. John considered his religious obligation — the seal of the confessional, an absolute duty of confidentiality between priest and penitent — inviolable, no matter the objections of the secular authority or the punishments threatened.
Nearly 600 years later, at the height of the Cristero War in Mexico — a Catholic uprising against a militant secularist state — another priest, Mateo Correa Magallanes, was arrested while delivering communion to a woman who was unable to travel to Mass. At his captors' request, Father Magallanes heard the confessions of a number of other prisoners. When General Eulogio Ortiz, commander of the unit that was holding him, demanded that Magallanes reveal what had been told to him in confession, the priest refused. He was shot the next morning.
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