Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions

The bishop was John Gabriel Taurin Dufresse of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, whose beheading by the Viceroy of Sichuan was approved by imperial decree in 1815. ¹ According to the biography the Holy See published for the canonization, Zhao Rong was one of the soldiers who escorted him "from Chengdu to Beijing", and "was moved by his patience". ¹ He asked to be numbered among the neophytes, was baptized, went to the seminary and was ordained a priest. ¹ Vatican News adds that he took the name Augustine at his baptism, and that something in the foreigner's bearing in the face of suffering and imminent death had struck him. ³

The sources do not agree on every detail of the journey. The Holy See biography says Dufresse was arrested on May 18, 1815, taken to Chengdu, condemned and executed on September 14 of that year. ¹ Vatican News and Franciscan Media describe the escort as the journey to the bishop's execution in Beijing, and Vatican News sets the soldier's conversion in the late 1700s. ³⁴ All of them agree on how it ended. Arrested as a priest, Augustine Zhao Rong suffered what the Holy See calls "the most cruel tortures" and died in 1815, the same year as the man who had converted him. ¹³⁴

Zhao Rong was not the only priest who came to the faith through Dufresse. Joseph Yuan heard the bishop speak of the Christian faith, was, in the biography's words, "overcome by its beauty", and was ordained and sent out to evangelize several districts; he was arrested in 1816 and strangled on June 24, 1817. ¹

The 120 span almost three centuries, and the first of them was a Spaniard. Francis Fernández de Capillas, a Dominican priest, was arrested by the Manchu forces who had overrun Fujian, imprisoned, tortured, and beheaded on January 15, 1648, while he was praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary with others. ¹ The Holy See recognizes him as the protomartyr of China. ¹

Vatican News quotes a letter he wrote from prison: "I live here in great joy … knowing that I am here because of the Lord Jesus Christ. The pearls I have found here these days are not always easy to find." ³ The pearls, it explains, were the fellow prisoners who asked him about the Gospel. ³ A century later, in a fresh wave of persecution, a Dominican bishop, Peter Sans i Yordà, and four Dominican priests were put to death in 1747 and 1748. ¹

The heaviest losses before 1900 came after the Emperor Kia-Kin began issuing decrees against Christianity in 1805. ¹ Two edicts of 1811 targeted Chinese men studying for the priesthood and priests who spread the faith, and a decree of 1813 pardoned any Christian who renounced the faith of his own accord and promised harsh treatment to the rest. ¹ Augustine Zhao Rong died in this persecution, and so did Peter Wu, a lay catechist strangled in 1814, and Joseph Zhang Dapeng, a merchant and catechist strangled in 1815. ¹

Some of them waited a long time for it. Peter Liu and Joachim Ho, both lay catechists, were seized in the persecution of 1814 and exiled to Tartary, where they spent almost twenty years; each came home, was arrested again, and was strangled, Peter Liu in 1834 and Joachim Ho in 1839. ¹ Francis Regis Clet, a priest of the Congregation of the Mission (the Vincentians), worked in China for thirty years across Jiangxi, Hubei and Hunan before a Christian betrayed him; he was strangled on February 17, 1820. ¹ Thaddeus Liu, a Chinese priest, refused to give up the faith on the ground, as the biography puts it, "that he was a priest and wanted to be faithful to the religion that he had preached", and was strangled in 1823. ¹

Augustus Chapdelaine, a priest of the diocese of Coutances who joined the Paris Foreign Missions Society, reached Guangxi at the end of 1854; arrested in 1856, he was tortured, condemned to death in prison, and died that February. ¹ Two Chinese Christians died with him that month or soon after: Laurence Bai Xiaoman, a laborer who had joined him in his hiding place, beheaded on February 25, and Agnes Cao Guiying, a widow who taught the girls he had converted, executed on March 1. ¹ More catechists, seminarians, a farmer and a widow who cooked for a seminary followed in Guizhou between 1858 and 1862. ¹

Most of the 120 died in a few weeks of 1900, in the uprising of the Society for Justice and Harmony, commonly known as the Boxers. ¹ On July 1 an edict declared that the time of good relations with the missionaries was over: they were to leave, and their Chinese converts were to renounce the faith on pain of death. ¹ The Holy See's biography acknowledges the anger at foreign powers that fed the rising, but insists that the missionaries were killed on religious grounds, "for the same reason as the Chinese faithful who had become Christians". ¹

In Shanxi, on July 9, 1900, five Franciscan friars were killed, two of them bishops, Gregory Grassi and Francis Fogolla. ¹ As the governor prepared to strike him with his sword, Fogolla told him, "We never wronged anyone", and then, "On the contrary, we have done good to many". ² Three more Franciscans died in southern Hunan the same week. ¹ The 120 also include seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, three of them French, two Italian, one Belgian and one Dutch, and eleven Chinese Secular Franciscans: five seminarians, and laymen who included a servant, a catechist, a farmer and a laborer. ¹

In southeastern Zhili, then a vicariate in the care of the Jesuits, the Christians killed could be counted in the thousands. ¹ Among the 120 are four French Jesuits and at least 52 Chinese lay people, many of whom died in the church of the village of Tchou-Kia-ho while praying with the priests Leo Mangin and Paul Denn. ¹ The Holy See lists them by name and age, from Paul Liu Jinde, 79, down to two boys of nine. ¹ John Paul II told two of their stories at the canonization. Ann Wang, fourteen, refused to apostatize and said as she was about to be beheaded, "The door of heaven is open to all"; Chi Zhuzi, eighteen, whose right arm had already been cut off, told his killers, "Every piece of my flesh, every drop of my blood will tell you that I am Christian". ²

The last two of the 120 were Italian Salesians, Bishop Louis Versiglia and Father Callistus Caravario, killed together on February 25, 1930. ¹

John Paul II canonized the 120 in Rome on October 1, 2000, in the same ceremony as Katharine Drexel, Josephine Bakhita and María Josefa Sancho de Guerra. ²⁴ He said the testimonies that had come down from the martyrs showed "deep serenity and joy". ² He also said plainly that the day was "not the appropriate time to pass judgement on those historical periods", and that the Church meant only to recognize the martyrs as an example of courage and consistency, who "honour the noble Chinese people". ² Of the 33 missionaries he said that their tombs in China signified "their definitive belonging to China, which they deeply loved". ²

Franciscan Media puts the history in political terms. Depending on China's relations with the outside world, it says, Christianity there "was free to grow or was forced to operate secretly". ⁴ Chinese Catholics were regarded by their persecutors as "allies of enemy, Catholic countries", and the missionaries were seen as Westerners "and therefore, by definition, anti-Chinese". ⁴

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Augustine Zhao Rong or for the martyrs of China as a group, so none is given here. ¹³⁴ Vatican News presents them as proof that the Church was alive in China, with Chinese-born servants "filled with courage and love". ³

Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and his companions share one feast, on July 9. ³⁴ In the calendar of the dioceses of the United States the day is an optional memorial, entered as "Saint Augustine Zhao Rong, Priest, and Companions, Martyrs". ⁵ July 9 is also the date on which, according to the Holy See biography, Joachim Ho was strangled in 1839 and the Franciscans of Shanxi were killed in 1900. ¹

The story begins with a guard watching a prisoner. Before Zhao Rong began to listen to what Dufresse taught, it was the bishop's patience under suffering that struck him, and he asked to become what he saw. ¹³ Most people who come to faith come to it by way of someone else, and the someone is rarely trying to make a convert at the time.

Ann Wang was fourteen and Chi Zhuzi eighteen. ² The Holy See's list of the Jesuit mission's dead gives an age beside every name, and two of them are nine. ¹ It is not a list to hurry through or to turn into a lesson.

Peter Liu and Joachim Ho spent almost twenty years in exile, came home, and were arrested again. ¹ Their faithfulness did not come in a single hour of decision but over decades, most of them spent far from home with no end in sight.

John Paul II declined to use the day of their canonization to settle old arguments about China and the West. ² The martyrs are honored for something simpler. Men and women, Chinese and foreign, were offered their freedom if they would renounce the faith, and many of them, as Vatican News puts it, refused. ³