Saint Lawrence Ruiz and Companions

Martyrs

Feast Day

September 28

Life

1600–1637

Canonized

1987

Born

Binondo, Manila, Philippines

Lorenzo Ruiz was born about 1600 in the Binondo district of Manila to a Chinese father and a Filipino mother, both Catholics. Educated by the Dominicans at the parish of Binondo, he served as an altar boy and parish notary, married, and had three children. In 1636, falsely accused of a crime he did not commit, he sailed for Japan with three Dominican priests, a Japanese priest, and a layman, not knowing that Japan was then closing itself under the Tokugawa shogunate's persecution of Christianity.

Arrested on arrival at Okinawa, the missionaries were taken to Nagasaki in 1637 and subjected to the water torture and the gallows-and-pit, in which the victim was hung head-downward in a pit, the temple bored to allow blood to drip, in the attempt to extort apostasy. The fifteen companions, Spaniards, French, Italians, and Japanese, all priests and lay tertiaries of the Order of Preachers, were executed between 1633 and 1637; Ruiz himself died on 29 September 1637 after refusing to renounce his faith. His final words were preserved by an eyewitness Dutch official: I am a Catholic and wholeheartedly do accept death for God; had I a thousand lives, all these to Him I shall offer.

Pope Saint John Paul II beatified Lorenzo Ruiz and his fifteen companions at Manila on 18 February 1981, the first beatification celebrated outside Rome since the early Christian centuries. He canonized them in Saint Peter's Square on 18 October 1987. Lorenzo Ruiz is the first Filipino canonized saint and patron of the Philippines.