Catholic Fire

Today, July 9, marks the optional memorial of St. Augustine Zhao Rong, priest, and companions, Chinese martyrs. Saint Augustine Zhao Rong was a Chinese diocesan priest who was martyred with his 119 companions in 1815. Christianity arrived in China by way of Syria in the 600s. Depending on China's relations with the outside world, Christianity over the centuries was free to grow or was forced to operate secretly. The 120 martyrs in this group died between 1648 and 1930. Most of them (eighty-seven) were born in China and were children, parents, catechists or laborers, ranging from nine years of age to seventy-two. This group includes four Chinese diocesan priests. The thirty-three foreign-born martyrs were mostly priests or women religious, especially from the Order of Preachers, the Paris Foreign Mission Society, the Friars Minor, Jesuits, Salesians and Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. One of the martyrs was a 14-year-old girl named Ann Wang, who was killed during the Bo...

The saint of the day for July 8 is St. Jeanne-Marie Kerguin, Franciscan Missionary and Martyr. Also known as Sr. Marie Santa Natalia, she is is one of the 29 martyrs of China’s Boxer Rebellion, the 1898-1901 uprising against foreign imperialism and Christianity. Jeanne-Marie was born on May 5, 1864, at Belle-Isle en Terre, France to a poor peasant family. Her mother died when she was quite young, and she took over the household chores for the family. In 1887, she joined the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, taking the name Marie Santa Natalia. There she happily threw herself into a life of prayer and devotion to the simplest and most menial tasks of her house. She was assigned first to Paris, then to Carthage in north Africa. She encountered health problems and was sent to Rome to recover. There she answered the call of her Order to work as a missionary. She arrived in China in March 1899, and was almost immediately hospitalized for several months with typhus. Her short lived care...