St. Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions

St. Augustine Zhao Rong was born in 1746 in China and stands at the head of the 120 Martyrs of China, a company of saints—eighty-seven Chinese faithful and thirty-three foreign missionaries—who died for the faith between 1648 and 1930, through successive waves of persecution under the imperial dynasties and the Boxer Uprising of 1900. Zhao Rong's own path to sainthood began on the other side of a prison door. A soldier in the imperial service, he was among the guards escorting the French missionary bishop John Gabriel Taurin Dufresse of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, who had been arrested during the persecutions in Sichuan. Moved by the bishop's patience and serenity under brutal treatment, Zhao Rong asked for baptism, taking the name Augustine. He went on to study for the priesthood and was ordained a diocesan priest—among the first generation of native Chinese clergy. Arrested in his turn for preaching the Gospel, he endured cruel tortures and died a martyr in 1815, the same period in which Bishop Dufresse himself was executed. His companions span nearly three centuries of Chinese Christianity: catechists, farmers, seminarians, mothers of families, children, religious sisters, and missionary priests and bishops from several religious orders. Many of the Chinese laity among them, including the young and the elderly, were killed during the Boxer Uprising for refusing to renounce Christ. Their stories, preserved in mission records and diocesan processes, testify that the faith in China was watered from the beginning by native as well as missionary blood. Pope St. John Paul II canonized Augustine Zhao Rong and his 119 companions on October 1, 2000. Their optional memorial is kept on July 9 in the General Roman Calendar, and they are venerated as patrons of China—a communion of witnesses in whom the Church honors the fidelity and hope of Chinese Catholics across the centuries.