Saints Ambrósio Francisco Ferro and Companions

Saints Ambrósio Francisco Ferro and Companions are the parish priest of Natal in northeastern Brazil and twenty-seven lay people, killed out of hatred for the Catholic faith on October 3, 1645, at Uruaçu. Together with the two martyrs murdered three months earlier at Cunhaú, they form the group of thirty saints whom the Church calls the protomartyrs of Brazil. Their memorial falls on October 3; the Roman Martyrology commemorates those killed at Cunhaú on July 16.

From 1630 the Dutch ruled northeastern Brazil. They were Calvinists; they gradually took away the Catholics’ freedom of worship and then began to persecute them. The parish priest of Our Lady of the Presentation in Natal at that time was the diocesan priest Ambrósio Francisco Ferro.

The first massacre took place on Sunday, July 16, 1645, at Cunhaú. Mass in the chapel there was being celebrated by the seventy-three-year-old parish priest, André de Soveral. Right after the consecration, Dutch soldiers with armed Indigenous men burst inside, barred the doors, and fell upon the defenseless faithful. The priest still managed to say the prayers for the dying with the people. More than sixty Catholics were killed; only the names of the parish priest and of the layman Domingos Carvalho are known.

Terrified, the Catholics of Natal tried to hide, but they were captured together with their parish priest and led to the area of Uruaçu. Dutch soldiers were waiting there with about two hundred Indigenous warriors under Antônio Paraopaba, a chief who had converted to Calvinism and was hostile to Catholics. The prisoners were cruelly tortured, but they would not abandon the Catholic faith. Father Ferro was tormented with particular cruelty because he was a priest of Christ. The mutilations were so inhuman that even a chronicler of the time shrank from describing them in detail.

Among those killed, the layman Mateus Moreira stood out. As the executioners were tearing out his heart through his back, he still managed to profess his faith in the Eucharist with the words “Louvado seja o Santíssimo Sacramento” (Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament). Of the many victims, the names of twenty-eight people from Uruaçu are known with certainty. Among them are families: fathers with their daughters, a husband and wife, and also João Martins with seven young companions.

The memory of the martyrs survived in an unbroken tradition; the oldest account was written by Lopo Curado Garro twenty days after the massacre at Uruaçu. In 1991 John Paul II, closing the National Eucharistic Congress in Natal, recalled the profession of faith of Mateus Moreira, and on March 5, 2000, in the five hundredth anniversary year of the evangelization of Brazil, he beatified the thirty martyrs in Saint Peter’s Square. Pope Francis canonized them on October 15, 2017, with a dispensation from the examination of a miracle.