Today, Dominicans commemorate the feast of St. Francis de Capillas (1607-48) and his companions. These 120 saints whom we remember and honor together were not companions in ministry who all died around the same time or even because of the same conflict. Instead, these companions in both faith and martyrdom lived over the span of nearly 400 years in China, and their witness of faith and martyrdom began with Francis de Capillas’ death in 1648.
Of the 120 martyrs, 87 were Chinese Christians, and 33 (including Francis de Capillas) were missionaries who, “left their land and sought to immerse themselves in the Chinese world, lovingly assimilating its features in the desire to proclaim Christ and to serve those people.” Most of them never knew any of the others personally. Some were ordained; others were laity. Among their number were men, women, teenagers, and even a few younger children. Together they shared what mattered most: their love of Jesus, and their desire to share that love with others, even at great cost and unto death.
We know only a few details of the life of St. Francis de Cappillas himself. Born in Palencia, Spain, he became a Dominican friar in 1632. He first left Spain for the Philippines, where he was ordained.
After some years in the Philippines and Taiwan, he was sent to the Fujian Province in southeast China in 1642. For the next six years he ministered with kindness and compassion to everyone he encountered. One morning in 1648, Francis set out from the village of Tingtau to minister to someone sick in a neighboring small village, despite the approach of an army with imperial orders to kill any Christian missionaries they found. He was said to be deeply humble and supposedly so kind and virtuous that one cardinal commented at his beatification in 1909 that “even if Francis had not been a martyr, he would still have been beatified.”
A quote of Francis survives from a collection of letters:
I am here with other prisoners and we have developed a fellowship. They ask me about the Gospel of the Lord. I am not concerned about getting out of here, because here I know I am doing the will of God. They do not let me stay up at night to pray, so I pray in my bed before dawn. I live here in great joy without any worry, knowing that I am here because of Jesus Christ.
It is easy as we live our day to day lives to myopically focus only on what is in front of us: our jobs, our vocations, our daily chores, the news in front of us, and the needs facing us. This feast commemorating and asking for the prayers of 120 martyrs across four centuries reminds us that wherever we are, we together belong to God and can preach the Gospel with our lives in every time and place. And like St. Francis de Capillas, we can live with joy in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, trusting in the Lord who loves us.
Pope St. John Paul II commented at the canonization of Francis de Capillas and his companions, “Today, with this solemn proclamation of holiness, the Church intends… to recognize that those martyrs are an example of courage and consistency to us all, and that they honour the noble Chinese people.” Their “unity in courage and consistency” reminds us of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:7-8).
In whatever century and whatever country and whatever vocation we may find ourselves, we are the Lord’s!
May St. Francis de Capillas and his companion martyrs of China pray for us!
Hope Zelmer
Hope Zelmer is a writer and a former theology teacher and campus minister at Fenwick High School, a Dominican Catholic preparatory school in Oak Park, Illinois. Hope has written for publications such as FaithND, Church Life Journal, and FemCatholic. She holds a BA and MA in Theology from the University of Notre Dame.