Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions
Martyrs
- Feast Day
- July 9
- Life
- 1746–1815
- Canonized
- 2000
- Born
- Guizhou Province, China
The Optional Memorial of Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions commemorates one hundred and twenty martyrs killed in China between 1648 and 1930: eighty-seven native Chinese Catholics (laypeople, catechists, seminarians, and priests) and thirty-three foreign missionaries (Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits, members of the Paris Foreign Mission Society, and one bishop of the Salesian order).
Saint Augustine Zhao Rong (1746-1815), whose name stands at the head of the group, was a soldier from Guizhou. While escorting the captured French missionary bishop John Gabriel Taurin Dufresse, MEP, to Beijing in 1771, he was deeply moved by the bishop's patience under suffering, and after Bishop Dufresse's martyrdom he asked for Baptism. He was eventually ordained the first Chinese diocesan priest of his region. Arrested during the persecution under the Jiaqing Emperor, he died of torture at Chengdu on January 27, 1815, the first native Chinese diocesan priest to be martyred.
The group includes martyrs of every status: Saint Lawrence Bai Xiaoman, an illiterate layman; Saint Anna Wang, a fourteen-year-old girl killed in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 with the words My heart is not changing on her lips; Saint Mark Ji Tianxiang, a Catholic father whose addiction to opium had kept him from the sacraments for thirty years and who at age sixty was beheaded for his faith; Saint Chi Zhuze, an eighteen-year-old recently baptized catechumen who, when offered freedom in exchange for renouncing Christ, replied I am a Christian, all my life long; and many others. The greatest single group is the eighty-six victims of the Boxer Rebellion (1900).
Pope Saint John Paul II canonized the one hundred and twenty Martyrs of China at Saint Peter's on October 1, 2000, the Solemnity of Mission Sunday in the Great Jubilee Year. The General Roman Calendar assigned the joint Memorial to July 9, the date in 1900 on which the Bishop of Taiyuan, Gregorio Maria Grassi, OFM, and his companions were beheaded by Boxer rebels.
In his canonization homily Pope Saint John Paul II said the martyrs of China teach the universal Church that the witness of Christ is rendered in every culture, and that the blood of those who profess one faith on Chinese soil reveals an authentically Catholic and authentically Chinese Church. Their feast on July 9 is observed throughout the Latin Rite as an Optional Memorial.
Patronages
China · the Catholic Church in China
Sources