St. Augustine Zhao Rong & Companions

Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries some 120 Catholics — Chinese laypeople, catechists, priests, and foreign missionaries — were martyred in waves of persecution culminating in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Canonized together by John Paul II in 2000, they include Augustine Zhao Rong, a Chinese soldier who had escorted a missionary to his death and was so moved by his witness that he himself converted, became a priest, and was martyred in 1815.

The martyrs span an extraordinary range of vocations and circumstances. Among them are the young seminarian Jean-Gabriel Perboyre, tortured and strangled in 1840; the twenty-six-year-old Anna Wang, who chose death rather than deny her faith during the Boxer uprising; and bishops, mothers, and catechists from provinces across China.

Their canonization was a delicate act of diplomacy and devotion, occurring over the objections of the Chinese government. Yet the Church insisted: these men and women died not for a foreign power but for Christ. Their witness testifies that the faith in China, though planted by outsiders, was made fully Chinese in the blood of its own sons and daughters.