Holy Martyrs of China

Description

The Martyr Saints of China (traditional Chinese: 中華殉道聖人; simplified Chinese: 中华殉道圣人; pinyin: Zhōnghuá xùndào shèngrén), or Augustine Zhao Rong and his Companions, are 120 saints of the Catholic Church. The 87 Chinese Catholics and 33 Western missionaries from the mid-17th century to 1930 were martyred because of their ministry and, in some cases, for their refusal to apostatize.

Many died in the Boxer Rebellion, in which anti-Western peasant rebels slaughtered 30,000 Chinese converts to Christianity along with missionaries and other foreigners.

In the General Roman Calendar of 1969, they are remembered with an optional memorial on 9 July.

The 17th and 18th centuries
On 15 January, 1648, during the Manchu Invasion to Ming China, Manchu Tatars, invaded the region of Fujian and captured Francisco Fernández de Capillas, a Dominican priest aged 40. After having imprisoned and tortured him, they beheaded him while he recited with others the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Father de Capillas has since been recognised by the Holy See as the protomartyr of China.

After the first wave of missionary activities in China during the late Ming to early Qing dynasties, the Qing government officially banned Catholicism (Protestantism was considered outlawed by the same decree, as it was linked to Catholicism) in 1724 and lumped it together with other ‘perverse sects and sinister doctrines’ in Chinese folk religion.

While Catholicism continued to exist and increase many-fold in areas beyond the government’s control (Sichuan notably; see “Catholic Church in Sichuan”), and many Chinese Christians fled the persecution to go to port cities in Guangdong or to The Philippines, where many translations of Christian works into Chinese occurred during this period, there were also many missionaries who broke the law and secretly entered the forbidden mainland territory. They eluded Chinese patrol boats on the rivers and coasts; however, some of them were caught and put to death.