St. Lorenzo Ruiz

Who they were

Lorenzo Ruiz was a thoroughly ordinary man of Binondo in Manila: Chinese father, Filipina mother, educated by the Dominicans, an altar server as a boy and a professional calligrapher and parish clerk as a man, married with three children.

In 1636, falsely implicated in a killing, he sought passage out of danger aboard a ship of Dominican missionaries, not knowing it was bound for Japan, then in the fiercest years of the persecution described on the page for the martyrs of Nagasaki. Arrested on arrival, he was subjected with his companions to the tortures engineered to produce apostasy, and given the exit repeatedly: renounce, and live, and return even to his family. The answer recorded of him at the end is the treasure of Filipino Christianity. He declared himself a Catholic and ready to die for God, and said that had he many thousands of lives, he would offer them all. He died at Nagasaki in 1637, a layman, a father, an accidental missionary. He was beatified in Manila in 1981, the first beatification ever held outside Rome, and canonized in 1987.

Why people turn to St. Lorenzo Ruiz

Filipino families everywhere. Overseas workers and migrants far from their families have in him a patron who knows precisely that ache. Altar servers, from his boyhood at the missal.

How to ask their intercession

For the family member working abroad, by name. And for anyone who ended up somewhere they did not choose and had to decide who they were there.