St. Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions

Who they were

The 120 Martyrs of China, canonized together in 2000, span nearly three centuries of the faith's costly history there, and their named leader carries the collection's meaning in one biography. Augustine Zhao Rong was a Chinese soldier assigned to escort an imprisoned missionary bishop to his death, was converted by the prisoner's bearing on the road, sought baptism, became one of the first Chinese diocesan priests, and died a martyr himself in 1815.

Of the 120, eighty seven are Chinese: catechists, farmers, mothers, seminarians, and children, the youngest nine years old, most of them killed in the summer of 1900 when the Boxer uprising fell on Christian villages. Thirty three are foreign missionaries who stayed with their people. These are China's saints, and the martyrs are overwhelmingly Chinese believers who died among their neighbours. The faith they died in lives in tens of millions of Chinese Christians today.

Why people turn to St. Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions

Chinese Catholic families and the parishes of the diaspora. And Zhao Rong's road gives everyone a patron for the slow conversion won by watching someone suffer well.

How to ask their intercession

For the Church in China, quietly. And for the person watching your hard season more closely than you know.