Biography | Adolfo Nicolás — Born Beside Santa María la Mayor in Villamuriel

People look for a Jesuit superior general in Rome or in a Tokyo lecture hall.

The birth record is Castilian.

Adolfo Nicolás Pachón was born on 29 April 1936 in Villamuriel de Cerrato, a municipality seven kilometres south of Palencia, between the river Carrión and the Canal de Castilla.

His parents were Adolfo Nicolás Rico and Modesta Pachón.

The parish church that still marks the square is Santa María la Mayor, a thirteenth-century temple on Calle Mayor declared a national historic-artistic monument in 1931.

The exact family house is not a public site, so the pin sits on the church a visitor can actually enter.

Spain in 1936 was already sliding into civil war.

Jesuit biographical notes record that political turmoil forced the family out of the home region and into frequent moves; much of his childhood was spent in Barcelona.

That early displacement is the first documented fact that later readers flatten into a simple Palencia origin story.

In 1953, at seventeen, he entered the Jesuit novitiate of Aranjuez in the Toledo province.

The Society he joined was still rebuilding after the Republican suppression and the wartime exile of Spanish novitiates.

He took the long formation that Jesuit constitutions require: novitiate, philosophy, a mission assignment, theology, ordination.

By 1960 he held a licentiate in philosophy from the University of Alcalá and had already accepted a call from the then superior general, Jean-Baptiste Janssens, for volunteers to the missions.

The boy from Villamuriel left Spain that year for Japan.

The church on this square did not follow him.

It remains the one building in the birth town that a stranger can stand in and date to the century before he was born.

Photo: church, Zarateman, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Hannes Heinsar, CC BY-SA 3.0, Vilnius, 26 August 2008.