Fr. Emilio Palafox Marqués, who turned 100 less than a month ago and was the second priest of Opus Dei who arrived in Mexico commissioned by its founder, San Josemaría Escrivá, died on Saturday, August 2.
“The morning of today, Saturday, August 2, 2025, memory of Our Lady of Los Angeles, after having participated in the Holy Mass and received the Sagrada Communion, Don Emilio has left the Father’s House,” says the Site web del work of.
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According to the Mexican newspaper El Imparcial, the priest suffered a cardiac arrest around 10 in the morning, which caused death.
P. Palafox was born in Granada (Spain) on July 12, 1925 in a Catholic family.
Being young, when he was a student in Valencia, he met Opus Dei, who was incorporated in 1941. He obtained a doctorate in biology and shared the first steps of the work outside of Madrid, seeing closely the progress of the Catholic institution in Spain, by the hand of his Holy Founder.
On July 1, 1951, a little over 74 years ago, he was ordained a priest and, a month later, he traveled to Mexico. He was the second priest of Opus Dei to reach the Latin American country, after Fr. Pedro Casciaro.
In 1977, he arrived in Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, where he was always active and available for almost five decades dedicated to his pastoral work, also as a spiritual director, always with a smile on his face.
Faith made him fall in love with the Catholic Church
In November 2015, when he was 90, he granted an interview in which he said he saw the church “with the love of a son.”
“And knowing leads to love. My knowledge of the Catholic faith for the priesthood and the experience of that faith has taken me to – I can say so – to fall in love with the Catholic Church, my mother the Holy Catholic Church,” he said.
P. Palafox stressed that “what our Catholic Church needs us believers is the deepest fidelity, and of the non -believers I would say that respect.”
To live attached to the Church, he explained, it is necessary “the Gospel, the life of Christ. If one approaches a little to what he said and what he did, he falls in love with that style of living and thinking. That is contained in the gospels.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.