Feast day: July 9
St. Augustine Zhao Rong & Companions
120 martyrs of China — 87 Chinese laypeople and 33 missionaries — spanning three centuries of persecution; Zhao Rong was a soldier converted by the courage of the prisoner he escorted.
The feast of St. Augustine Zhao Rong and his companions honours the Martyrs of China — a group of one hundred and twenty saints who gave their lives for the faith in that vast land across more than two and a half centuries, from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth.
Augustine Zhao Rong, who gives the group its name, was himself a Chinese soldier in the eighteenth century. Assigned to escort a condemned European missionary bishop, he was so moved by the prisoner's patience and faith that he asked to become a Christian, was baptized, and was eventually ordained a priest — only to be arrested and martyred in his turn, about 1815.
The hundred and twenty include Chinese laypeople of every age and station — among them catechists, farmers, mothers, and children as young as seven — together with foreign missionaries from several religious orders. Many died in the great anti-Christian outbreaks, above all the Boxer Uprising of 1900, which alone claimed thousands of Chinese Christian lives.
Canonized together by Pope John Paul II in 2000, they are remembered as witnesses to the deep roots the faith had put down in China — ordinary Chinese Christians who would not deny Christ even at the cost of their lives.
Zhao Rong guarded a bishop being marched to execution, was converted by his patience, became a priest, and was martyred himself.
Image: Fayhoo (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20001001_zhao-rong-compagni_en.html
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