Feast day: September 11

St. John Gabriel Perboyre

Priest, Martyr · 1802–1840

Patron of China missions

A French Vincentian priest who longed for the missions of China, served there in disguise during persecution, was betrayed, tortured, and strangled on a cross-shaped frame.

John Gabriel Perboyre was born in 1802 into a devout farming family of southern France that gave several of its children to the Church. He entered the Congregation of the Mission — the Vincentians, founded by St. Vincent de Paul — was ordained a priest, and served for some years as a seminary teacher and superior in France, admired for his gentleness and his hidden interior life.

From his youth he had longed for the foreign missions, especially China, where his own brother, a young missionary, had died on the voyage out. At last, in 1835, his wish was granted, and he sailed for China, then closed and dangerous to Christianity, where European priests had to disguise themselves and minister in secret to scattered, persecuted Catholic communities.

He laboured in the central provinces for several years until a fresh wave of persecution broke out. Betrayed by a catechumen for a small reward, he was arrested, dragged from tribunal to tribunal, interrogated, and subjected to prolonged and brutal tortures meant to make him renounce his faith and reveal other Christians. He refused.

In 1840 he was strangled on a cross-shaped frame — a death his admirers saw as conformed to that of Christ. Beatified in 1889 and canonized in 1996, he was among the first martyrs of modern China to be raised to the altars, honoured as a patron of the China missions.

He was bound to a wooden cross and strangled — his death so resembling his Lord's that he became the first canonized martyr of the China missions.

Image: Pierre Salives (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/08327a.htm