Saints Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions

Saints Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions are 120 martyrs who gave their lives for Christ in China between 1648 and 1930. Eighty-seven of them were Chinese and thirty-three were missionaries from Europe. Among them are bishops, priests, men and women religious, seminarians and catechists, but the largest number are lay people: fathers and mothers of families, young people and children. The Church commemorates them together on July 9.

The first martyr of this group was the Spanish Dominican Francis Fernández de Capillas, beheaded after a long imprisonment at Fu’an in the province of Fujian on January 15, 1648. In 1747 and 1748 Bishop Peter Sans i Jordà and four priests of his order were killed.

Augustine Zhao Rong was born in 1746 in Wuchuan. As a soldier he escorted imprisoned Christians and was moved by their perseverance; according to the biography published by the Holy See, among them was the French missionary John Gabriel Taurin Dufresse. Zhao Rong received baptism and became a priest who served the faithful in hiding. In the persecution of 1815 he was thrown into prison in Sichuan and died as a result of torture, on a day that is not known. In the same year Bishop Dufresse was beheaded in Chengdu.

Most of them were killed in 1900, during the uprising of the Boxers, known as the Yihetuan, when an edict ordered that Christians be forced to abandon the faith on pain of death. At Taiyuan on July 9 the Franciscan bishops Gregory Grassi and Francis Fogolla were killed with twenty-four companions, among them seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and Chinese seminarians and lay people. Fogolla answered the governor who was raising his sword against him that they had never done harm to anyone and, on the contrary, had done good to many.

In Hebei parents died together with their children; the youngest martyrs were nine years old, the oldest seventy-nine. Fourteen-year-old Anna Wang said before her beheading that the door of heaven is open to all. The eighteen-year-old catechumen Chi Zhuzi, whose right arm had been cut off, cried out that every drop of his blood would say he was a Christian. Mary Guo Lizhi strengthened seven members of her family, whom she accompanied to the place of execution. Mark Ji Tianxiang, kept from the Eucharist for thirty years because of his opium habit, never stopped praying for a good death and confessed the faith before his judges.

The last of the group, the Salesians Luigi Versiglia, a bishop, and Callisto Caravario, a priest, were killed in 1930. The martyrs were beatified in several groups from 1893 on, by Leo XIII, Pius X, Pius XII and John Paul II in turn. John Paul II canonized them all together on October 1, 2000, in Saint Peter’s Square. In his homily he said that the Church intends only to recognize that they are an example of courage and consistency to us all and that they honor the noble Chinese people.