Homily for Memorial of Chinese Martyrs

Homily for the Memorial

of 120 Chinese Martyrs

July 9, 2020

Collect

Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.

Today’s memorial is labeled “St. Augustine Zhao and Companions.”  Augustine Zhao was an elderly diocesan priest who was so severely tortured in prison in 1815 that he died.  As you may know, John Paul the Great canonized these martyrs on Oct. 1, 2000, memorial of St. Therese of Lisieux, patroness of the missions; and coincidentally (or not) the anniversary of the Chinese Communists’ complete victory over the armies of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949.

Memorial plaque for the 120 Martyr Saints of China
Saint Francis Xavier Church, Saigon

Just why Fr. Augustine should be the day’s titular isn’t clear to me.  He wasn’t the 1st to die.  Chronologically, he falls about halfway in the period marked by today’s 120 martyrs—between 1648 and 1930.  There are 6 bishops among the 120, as well as many other priests (mostly religious).  So why him?  Perhaps because he was the 1st Chinese priest put to death, tho not the only one.

Besides clergy, seminarians, and religious, the martyrs included parents, widows, children, catechists, and common laborers.  They ranged in age from 9 to 79.   87 were Chinese, 33 European.  The religious were mainly Dominicans and Franciscans; there were also members of the Paris Foreign Mission Society, and others, and religious sisters.

Christianity had been known in parts of China since the 7th century, and it was sometimes welcomed.  The great Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who died in 1610, was honored, and is still honored, as a mandarin because of his vast learning and his willingness to make himself Chinese—“becoming all things to all men in order to win at least some,” as St. Paul says.

But, due to internal jealousies as well as theological issues, the Church’s position regarding inculturation changed.  The Dominicans won the Chinese Rites battle over the Jesuits, and fittingly China’s protomartyr in 1648 was a Dominican, Fr. Francis Fernandez de Capillas.  More virulent persecution didn’t come until the 1720s, and went on sporadically until 1862.  Chinese who apostasized were spared.

The persecutions seemed to end with the intervention of France and other powers.  The missions, both Catholic and Protestant, became associated with European political and economic imperialism.  Hatred for that power, and other issues, burst out in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, during which 86 to today’s saints gave their lives for Christ.  As many as 25,000 Christians may actually have been slain, but documenting them is difficult.

After the Boxers were suppressed by the armed forces of Japan, Russia, Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and the U.S., no more missionaries were killed until 1930.  Our confreres Louis and Callistus were the last of the 120 to die for the faith.  When the Communists took over the mainland in 1949, however, they didn’t lose much time in expelling or imprisoning foreign missionaries—most famously Bp. Francis Ford and Bp. James Walsh of Maryknoll—and “re-educating” thousands of lay faithful.

The linkage of Christianity with foreign powers, foreign pressure, and foreign culture lingers today in the tensions between the Catholic Church and Beijing.  The persecution of Christians, Catholics in particular, goes on.  Dennis has told us something of the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party goes, apart from what we read and hear in the media.  Cardinal Zen is constantly warning us of the nature of the CCP, which tolerates no rivals to its authority.

    

It’s the memorial of Augustine Zhou and his companions.  Have you ever wondered about “the companions” component of these big groupings of martyrs—Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean—spread over centuries?  In what sense are Francis Fernandez and Callistus Caravario “companions” of Augustine Zhou?  Certainly not the same way that Callistus was Bp. Louis’s companion, or the victims of the Boxers were at least chronologically, and sometimes physically, companions.

Companion comes from 2 Latin words, cum, “with,” and panis, “bread.”  Someone who shares bread with you is a companion.  All 120 of these martyrs shared bread together, the Bread of Christ’s body and blood; and today, we believe, they keep company with him at the eternal banquet.  The Eucharistic bread that we share today makes us, too, their companions.  We count on their prayers to help us be as faithful to Christ as they were until we join them at the banquet.