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FranΓ§ois RΓ©gis Clet, CM — Vincentian Priest, Missionary to China, Martyr (1748–1820)
The Grenoble That Made Him
Francis Regis Clet was born in 1748. His father was a merchant of Grenoble in France, his mother's name was Claudine Bourquy. He was the tenth of fifteen children. The family was deeply religious, several members of it having consecrated themselves to God.
Grenoble in the mid-eighteenth century was a city of considerable intellectual and commercial vitality — the capital of the DauphinΓ©, situated at the confluence of the IsΓ¨re and Drac rivers, cradled on three sides by the massive limestone walls of the Alps that give the city its dramatic and slightly theatrical character. It was a city of lawyers, merchants, and Parlementaires, proud of its traditions of independent legal thinking, already producing the political theorists who would contribute to the revolutionary debates that were still a generation away. Into this world of commercial piety and civic intelligence, Francis Clet was born the tenth child of a household that had already, by sheer demographic force, given several of its members to religious life.
He was named, in the fashion of Catholic Grenoble, for the recently canonized Jesuit saint whose memory was still fresh in the city's devotional life: Jean FranΓ§ois RΓ©gis, SJ, a fellow Grenoblian who had been recently canonized. The naming was a form of commission — a baptismal aspiration, placing the newborn under the patronage of a man who had exhausted himself in apostolic work among the mountain poor of the Massif Central and died of cold and overwork at forty-three, declaring with his last breath that he was happy. Whether FranΓ§ois RΓ©gis Clet consciously carried the weight of his namesake's example throughout his life, or whether the parallel was only visible in retrospect, the symmetry would prove exact: another man who would give himself entirely, who would die far from home in the service of the poor, who would be declared holy by the same Church that had declared his patron holy.
Francis attended the Jesuit college at Grenoble and afterwards entered the diocesan seminary which was in charge of the Oratorians. His extant letters in French and Latin show a cultivated mind. The quality of his education is evidenced by those letters — careful, precise, theologically informed, never verbose — and by the nickname that would follow him into his years of teaching: "the walking library." He was a man who read everything, retained everything, and could produce what was needed from the vast archive of his memory with the unhurried ease of a man who has genuinely understood, rather than merely memorized.
The Vincentian Vocation and the Years of Teaching
On March 6, 1769, he entered the novitiate of the Congregation of the Mission or Lazarists, at Lyons. There he made his vows in 1771 and was ordained priest in 1773. The same year he went as professor of moral theology to the diocesan seminary at Annecy.
The Congregation of the Mission — founded by Vincent de Paul in 1625, headquartered at the Priory of Saint-Lazare in Paris, and therefore known alternatively as the Lazarists or Vincentians — was one of the great missionary congregations of the post-Tridentine Church. Its charism was double: the renewal of rural Christianity in France through popular missions, and the formation of clergy through the direction of seminaries. In both dimensions it was intensely practical — Vincent de Paul had been, above everything else, a man of effective apostolic action, impatient with piety that did not produce results, insistent that charity to the poor was the measure of all religious authenticity. The Congregation he founded expressed his personality: organized, serious, doctrinally orthodox, and perpetually oriented toward those whom the Church most easily overlooked.
Francis Clet fit the Vincentian intellectual tradition with natural exactness. At the Vincentian seminary in Annecy he was affectionately called "the walking library" because of his encyclopedic knowledge and academic discipline. For sixteen years he taught moral theology at Annecy, producing generations of seminarians who carried his careful ethical reasoning into the parishes of the French church. He was a rigorous teacher — demanding precision, refusing the comfortable generalizations that pass for thinking in institutions that have stopped taking ideas seriously — but also a genuinely pastoral one, whose interest in moral theology was not academic in the pejorative sense but oriented always toward the practical formation of priests who would guide souls.
In 1786, he became Rector of Annecy and two years later, Director of Novices in Paris. The appointment as Director of Novices at Saint-Lazare in Paris placed him at the heart of the Congregation's formation work — the man responsible for the spiritual and human development of the next generation of Vincentian priests. It was an appointment of significant trust and influence, suggesting that his superiors had recognized in him not merely intellectual ability but the pastoral wisdom and personal holiness that formation work requires.
And yet, even at this height of his influence and professional usefulness, Clet was carrying a different desire.
The Petition to China: A Dream Long Deferred
Francis Regis petitioned to go to China as a missionary several times, but his superiors did not accede to his request until 1791. The repeated refusals were not capricious. They reflected a genuine institutional dilemma: here was the Congregation's most effective teacher of moral theology, a man whose intellectual gifts had produced fruits at Annecy for sixteen years and who was now forming the next generation of missionaries at Saint-Lazare. To send him to China was to remove from the formation work a resource that was difficult or impossible to replace. His superiors' reluctance was, from their perspective, entirely rational.
But Clet persisted. The precise source of his missionary desire is not documented with the specificity that would allow a definitive account, but its character can be reconstructed from the trajectory of his life and the content of his letters. He was a man for whom the Vincentian charism was not a professional identity but an existential commitment — a man who took Vincent de Paul's insistence on the preferential service of the poor with complete seriousness, and who understood that "the poor" in the broadest apostolic sense included the Chinese Christians who had been served by the Congregation's mission since the seventeenth century and who needed priests desperately. He wanted to go where he was most needed, not where he was most comfortable.
The Revolution settled the question in its characteristically violent way. In 1789, he was named director of the Lazarist Seminary in Paris, but was obliged by the fury of the revolution in that year, with the entire Congregation, to abandon the mother house. The Revolutionary government's systematic dismantling of the religious orders — confiscating their houses, dissolving their communities, driving their members into hiding or exile — removed Clet from his position at Saint-Lazare and, in doing so, removed the institutional argument for keeping him in France. There was no seminary to direct if the seminary had been seized. There were no novices to form if the novitiate had been shuttered. The Revolution that was destroying the Church in France was simultaneously liberating Francis Clet for the work he had been asking to do for years.
At the age of 43, he replaced another priest who had to withdraw from the assignment at the last minute. The replacement nature of his appointment — filling a vacancy created by another's last-minute withdrawal — has the feel of providential arrangement: a door that had been repeatedly shut finally opening, not through the normal channels of deliberate institutional decision but through the accidental gap created by someone else's incapacity. He did not plan it. He was simply ready, and when the opening appeared, he walked through it.
The Six-Month Sea Journey and the Arrival in China
In 1791, Francis Clet embarked at a French port — the sources do not specify which — and began the journey to China that would occupy the remaining twenty-nine years of his life. The sea voyage to Asia in the late eighteenth century was a journey of six months, a sustained encounter with the immensity of ocean and the fragility of human arrangements, a crossing of the world that imposed upon everyone who made it a physical experience of how far they had come and how definitively they had left behind everything they knew.
After a six-month sea journey from France and some transition time in Macao, which included assuming the dress and customs of the Chinese people, the new missioner arrived in Kiang-si in October of 1792 as the only European in the area. The period in Macao — the Portuguese enclave on the Chinese coast that served as the gateway through which Western missionaries entered the interior — was not merely a logistical pause but a formation experience of a different kind. He adopted Chinese dress, began the agonizing process of language acquisition, learned the protocols of movement and social interaction that might allow a European to survive in a society that was often openly hostile to Western presence.
The language proved to be his greatest sustained difficulty. In 28 years of work, he never mastered the language. This is a fact of some significance — a man of exceptional intelligence and encyclopedic learning, who read and wrote Latin and French with precision and elegance, who had spent his entire adult life in the company of texts and ideas, who could not in twenty-eight years of immersion achieve fluency in the language of the people he had come to serve. Chinese is, for a European mind trained on Latin grammar and French syntax, a linguistic world so entirely differently constructed that the ordinary tools of language acquisition fail. The tonal system, the character-based writing, the grammatical structures that differ from European patterns at every level — Clet was still wrestling with these at the end of his life, still dependent on Chinese catechists and companions to mediate his pastoral communication.
He learned to live with this limitation as he learned to live with everything else — not without frustration, but without the spiritual collapse that frustrated ambition can produce in a man who confuses his gifts with his purpose. His purpose was not to speak Chinese brilliantly. His purpose was to serve Chinese Christians. He did the second imperfectly but faithfully, through interpreters and catechists and the universal language of physical presence.
Kiang-si and Hou-Kouang: The Immensity of the Mission
After one year, Fr. Clet moved to Huguang (today's Hubei and Hunan), joining two confreres in caring for ten thousand Christians in an area of nearly two million square miles. The priests were based in Kucheng. Due to the immense territory they covered, the confreres saw each other infrequently. Within a year, Clet's confreres both died.
The death of his two companions — one in prison and one from exhaustion — left Clet alone in a territory whose dimensions stagger the imagination. Two hundred and seventy thousand square miles is larger than France itself, and Clet was the sole European priest responsible for the pastoral care of ten thousand Christians scattered across it. The logistics of such a mission — the distances between communities, the primitive roads, the seasonal impassability of mountain routes, the necessity of traveling secretly and by night to avoid detection by anti-Christian officials — made the work simultaneously urgent and nearly impossible.
He traveled on foot and by boat, on horseback when it was available, covering enormous distances to celebrate Mass, hear confessions, baptize, confirm, and bury. He lived, as a matter of survival, like the poorest of the population he served — his own life was simple and austere; he lived like the poor in the country. This was not merely tactical necessity but spiritual conviction. The Vincentian charism demanded solidarity with the poor, not merely service to them. Clet ate what they ate, slept where they slept, endured what they endured. The identity between the missionary and the mission community was as close as his Chinese limitations and European origins allowed.
In that year, Clet became superior of an international group of Vincentian missioners scattered over a very large territory, and in that leadership capacity, he developed standards so that there would be a uniform approach to ministry — sacramental and catechetical — among the missioners. The creation of uniform pastoral standards for a scattered, linguistically diverse, perpetually threatened mission community was an act of institutional intelligence — the professor of moral theology applying his systematic mind to the chaotic realities of frontier mission. Without common standards, the scattered communities would drift in different directions, forming local customs and practices that would eventually diverge from the common faith and from one another. Clet understood that the fragility of the mission made consistency more, not less, important.
His letters from this period — preserved at the Vincentian motherhouse in Paris — are documents of extraordinary pastoral wisdom. He urged his colleagues to observe similar attention to their own spirituality and cautioned against "indiscreet zeal…which tries to do everything at once, a thing which speedily ruins the health of missionaries and reduces them to inactivity, and then the enemy comes and sows the cockle in the field." The agricultural image — the enemy sowing weeds in the unguarded field — is characteristically Vincentian in its practicality. He was warning against the particular spiritual danger of apostolic overextension: the temptation to do so much that one does nothing sustainable, burning through one's health and effectiveness in a blaze of activity that leaves the mission worse off than a steadier, slower pace would have done. He knew the danger because he had seen it kill his companions.
The Persecutions Begin: A Life on the Run
In 1811, the anti-Christian persecutions in China intensified with the Christians being accused of inciting rebellion against the ruling dynasty. For several years, Clet endured abuse and attacks, which frequently forced him to find refuge in the mountains.
The Qing Dynasty's periodic campaigns against Christianity were driven by several distinct anxieties that converged on the same practical conclusion. Christianity was foreign — it had come from the West, it maintained connections to Rome, it represented a loyalty that could potentially transcend the emperor's claims on his subjects' absolute allegiance. It was also, in the view of Chinese officials who observed Christian communities closely, socially disruptive — it created networks of solidarity that cut across clan and class lines, it taught that there was a moral authority higher than the emperor's will, and it attracted the allegiance of people at the social margins whose grievances could, in a time of crisis, be channeled into something politically dangerous.
In May 1818, a thunderstorm with torrential rain hit Pekin. The emperor's astrologers and advisers attributed this storm to curses and enchantments brought by the Christians, launching persecutions that began in Huguang. The attribution of a thunderstorm to Christian malevolence reflects the cosmological framework within which the Qing court operated — a framework in which the emperor's virtue maintained the harmony of heaven and earth, and in which disasters were therefore evidence of corruption in the body politic. Christians, as practitioners of an unauthorized foreign religion, were convenient candidates for the role of cosmic troublemakers when the weather misbehaved.
Fr. Clet and two other priests went into hiding. Not only were the priests hunted by mandarins, but the Christian congregations became so fearful of government retaliation that they turned away from their Christian faith and even aided the government and military agents. This detail is among the most humanly painful in Clet's story. The people he had served for two decades, whose sacramental life he had maintained at enormous personal cost, whose communities he had organized and nurtured — when the pressure became intense enough, some of them broke. They did not merely fall silent; they actively assisted the authorities who were hunting the priest who had baptized their children and buried their dead. The fear that produces such betrayal is not contemptible — it is the fear of people whose survival depends on the goodwill of local officials who have made their hostility to Christianity unmistakable. But it is still a form of abandonment, and Clet experienced it.
He also experienced, conversely, the extraordinary courage of Chinese Christians who sheltered him, fed him, guided him through mountain terrain at night, and risked their own lives and their families' safety to keep him alive. The mission survived not because of Clet alone but because of the unnamed network of Chinese believers who chose, again and again, to pay the cost of faithfulness.
The Betrayal and the Arrest
After years of remarkable escapes — of last-minute warnings, of departures from houses that were searched hours after he had left them, of movements through the mountains guided by Christians who knew the territory — the end came through the mechanism that the Gospels had already made familiar.
On June 16, 1819, with a bounty on his head, Francis was betrayed by a Christian schoolmaster whose behavior the missionary had tried to correct. The bounty on his head was fifteen hundred dollars — a sum of enormous significance in the economy of rural China, enough to change a man's life, enough to make the calculation of betrayal seem, to a desperate or compromised person, rationally defensible. The betrayer was not a stranger but a member of the Christian community, a schoolmaster — a man of some education and social standing in the local church, a man whom Clet had presumably trusted with the education of the community's children and whom Clet had recently challenged for conduct unworthy of his position.
The dynamic is squalid and tragically familiar: the pastoral correction of someone in a position of responsibility, the wounded pride or the genuine guilt that the correction provokes, the discovery that betrayal offers simultaneously financial reward and the elimination of the person who had seen one clearly and said so. The schoolmaster collected his fifteen hundred dollars. Francis Clet was arrested.
Like the missionary Saint Paul, Clet endured ignominy and forced marches in chains over hundreds of miles. The journey from his place of arrest to the prison in Wuchang was not a transfer but a punishment — hundreds of miles on foot, in chains, through terrain that the sixty-year-old priest had spent years traveling with difficulty even in freedom. The forced march was designed to be humiliating and physically destroying. For five weeks he endured cruel tortures in total silence, then was transferred to another prison.
The silence is not the silence of stoic indifference. It is the silence of a man who has decided, before the tortures began, what he will and will not give his tormentors. He will not give them the spectacle of his breaking. He will not give them the names of the Chinese Christians who had sheltered him. He will not give them the satisfaction of visible suffering. What he gives them instead is the blank wall of a self whose interior has been fortified by thirty years of prayer against exactly this moment.
The Prison in Wuchang and the Unexpected Consolations
After a month at his first prison, Fr. Clet was transferred to a district more than four hundred miles away. He was taken to a prison in Wuchang, where he was reunited with a Fr. Chen and other Christians. They were able to pray together daily without repercussions. A priest who was surreptitiously visiting neighboring Christian communities was able to sneak in to hear the prisoners' confessions and bring them Holy Communion.
The prison in Wuchang — the city on the Yangtze that would, a century later, be the site of the uprising that ended the Qing Dynasty and established the Chinese Republic — provided Clet with something he had not had since his arrest: the sacraments. Father Chen, a Chinese Lazarist who had been arrested before him, was there. The two priests were allowed to pray together. The visiting priest who slipped in to hear confessions and distribute communion was taking an enormous risk, and his courage gave the prisoners the spiritual sustenance that the torturers had been unable to take from them.
Fr. Clet described his joy at God's paternal care, which allowed him to receive the sacraments and to continue to minister to the faithful with whom he was imprisoned. The description of prison, in his letters from this period, as a place of God's paternal care is not the forced optimism of a man constructing a spiritual narrative over experience that contradicts it. It is the observation of a man genuinely surprised by the forms in which grace appeared — not in the freedom and the open road and the sacramental ministry he had exercised for three decades, but in a prison cell in Wuchang, praying with a Chinese confrere while waiting for an emperor's decision about his death.
In January 1820, Fr. Lamiot, Superior of the mission at Pekin, Fr. Chen and Fr. Clet were brought before the Grand Mandarin for trial. Fr. Lamiot was released but Frs. Chen and Clet were sent back to prison to await the emperor's decision on their fate. The release of Lamiot and the condemnation of Clet and Chen reflects the complex calculations of Qing justice: the French priest could be most usefully made an example of, while a French superior's execution might create more diplomatic difficulty than it was worth. The Chinese Lazarist, Father Chen, was condemned alongside the European — his Chinese identity offered him no protection when his Christian identity was the relevant fact.
The Sentence and the Three-Fold Death
On January 1, 1820, Clet was found guilty of deceiving the Chinese people by preaching Christianity and was sentenced to strangulation on a cross. The charge — "deceiving the Chinese people by preaching Christianity" — is a document of profound inadvertent testimony. The imperial judicial system, in its verdict, concisely summarized the entire twenty-nine-year mission: this man preached Christianity. That was the crime. That was what he had come to do. That was what he had done in poverty and danger for nearly three decades. The court intended the verdict as condemnation; history reads it as epitaph.
Pending confirmation of the sentence by the emperor, he wrote: "I prepare for death, often repeating with Saint Paul: 'if I live, it is for Jesus Christ and death will be for me a gain.'" The Pauline quotation — from the letter to the Philippians, written by Paul himself in prison awaiting a capital verdict — is not literary decoration. It is Clet locating himself precisely within the apostolic tradition: the prisoner of Christ, who has passed beyond the point where death represents a loss and arrived at the point where it represents completion. He was seventy-one years old. He had been in China since he was forty-three. He had no fear left to overcome, or rather he had overcome whatever fear he had, by this long arrival at the peace of those who have given everything and find that giving everything is not poverty but abundance.
The emperor's confirmation came. The execution was scheduled for February 18, 1820.
He was tied to a stake erected like a cross, and was strangled to death, the rope having been relaxed twice to give him a three-fold death agony.
The method of execution — strangulation by a garrote applied to the neck, then relaxed, then applied again, then relaxed again, then applied finally — was designed to maximize the duration and intensity of dying. The rope was not simply pulled tight and held. It was tightened until the condemned man lost consciousness, then loosened until he partially revived, then tightened again. The "three-fold death agony" of the martyrological tradition is not metaphor; it is a precise description of what was done to the seventy-two-year-old French Vincentian priest who had spent his adult life serving the poor of China.
He died at the stake. He had outlasted the stake of Saint Andrew, the wheel of Saint Catherine, the crucifixion of Saint Peter. He died like his Lord — not on the same instrument, but in the same posture of surrender, tied to a cross-shaped post, in the presence of a crowd that the authorities had assembled to witness the destruction of the foreign devil and the faith he represented.
The crowd witnessed something else.
The Body and the Burial
As in the case of Jesus, Christians took his body and buried it on a hillside where it rested until it was returned to the Vincentian motherhouse in Paris several decades later.
The parallel the source draws — "as in the case of Jesus" — is intentional and apt. The unnamed Chinese Christians who claimed the body of Francis Clet from the execution ground and carried it to the hillside were performing the same act of devotion that Joseph of Arimathea had performed after the Crucifixion: taking the broken body of the condemned man away from the place of public death and giving it the dignity of private burial, the dignity of being mourned and remembered rather than left to the disposal of the authorities who had killed him.
His remains rest in the chapel of the mother house of the Lazarists, in Paris. The return of his relics from a Chinese hillside to the chapel of Saint-Lazare in Paris is a journey that traces the arc of his vocation in reverse: the body that had left the rue du Bac for the harbor in 1791 came back, decades after its death, to the house where Clet had formed the novices who would carry the Vincentian mission forward. The chapel that receives his relics is the chapel where the missionaries are sent forth; it is fitting that the relics of one who went and did not return should rest there, as a permanent testimony to what the sending means.
The Inspiration of John Gabriel Perboyre
His holy life and death were the inspiration of Blessed John Gabriel Perboyre, also a Lazarist, who was martyred in China in 1840.
This genealogy of inspiration — one martyr's death kindling the missionary vocation of the next — is one of the patterns by which the tradition perpetuates itself. John Gabriel Perboyre entered the Congregation of the Mission twenty years after Clet's martyrdom; he had heard the story, had been formed by it, and had felt in it a call of his own. He went to China. He too was arrested, tortured, and strangled — in an execution of such deliberately Passion-shaped cruelty that witnesses described it as a deliberate re-enactment. The rope, the cross-shaped stake, the same province of China that had seen Clet die twenty years before: Perboyre's martyrdom was, in its form, a continuation of Clet's.
The chain does not stop with Perboyre. The knowledge that Clet had died in Wuchang, that Perboyre had died in China, that the mission cost everything and had always cost everything — this knowledge formed every subsequent generation of Vincentian missionaries who presented themselves at the rue du Bac and asked to be sent. The martyrs do not merely testify to the faith; they recruit for it, by demonstrating that it is serious enough to die for.
Beatification and Canonization
He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on May 27, 1900. The beatification came eighty years after his death — a long maturation, during which the Chinese church had continued to grow, to suffer, and to produce its own subsequent generations of witnesses. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 — which erupted in the very year of Clet's beatification — would add dozens more to the roster of Chinese martyrs, demonstrating that the pattern of his death was not an historical anomaly but the recurrent signature of the faith's encounter with a world that had not yet finished deciding what to do with it.
He was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 1, 2000, as part of the group of 120 Martyr Saints of China — the same ceremony and the same October morning that raised Jean-Pierre NΓ©el and his companions to the altar of the universal Church, uniting in a single act of recognition the martyrs of three centuries, the MEP priests and the Vincentians, the diocesan clergy and the religious, the European missionaries and the Chinese catechists who had died beside them or before them or long after them for the same refusal to deny the same faith.
The Legacy: A Vincentian at the World's End
Francis Regis Clet is a figure of particular significance within the Vincentian tradition, and his significance is not diminished by the institutional obscurity that has allowed him to remain less well-known than some of the saints with whom he shares the feast of the 120 Martyrs of China.
He was, first and most profoundly, a Vincentian in the fullest sense — a man who took the founder's insistence on solidarity with the poor not as a slogan but as a literal program of life. He lived like the poor of China for twenty-nine years. He ate their food, wore their clothes, traveled their roads, endured their dangers, shared their vulnerability before an official system that had no interest in their welfare and periodic interest in their destruction. The Vincentian charism of preferential service to the most abandoned — which Vincent de Paul had expressed primarily in the context of the rural poor of seventeenth-century France — Clet expressed in the context of the Chinese peasant Christian of the early nineteenth century, in one of the most remote and difficult missionary territories on earth.
He was, second, a man of extraordinary intellectual gifts who did not allow those gifts to create the distance that intellectual gifts often create between the formed and the unformed, the learned and the unlettered. Clet regretted his apparent lack of success in apostolic endeavors. His converts neglected his counsel, were ungrateful, and made false accusations against him to the Bishop of the Vicariate. Eventually, the accusations were exposed as falsehood. He was not spared the ingratitude and the misrepresentation that test the interior freedom of every missionary. He endured them, waited for the truth to emerge, and continued the work.
He was, third, a martyr whose death was architecturally precise in its symbolic dimensions. Tied to a cross-shaped stake, strangled three times — the triple death that the sources consistently record was not accidental but the prescribed form of execution for the specific crime of which he was convicted. The Chinese imperial penal code specified the method. But the method, whatever its legal provenance, produced a death whose form the Christian imagination could not fail to read as Paschal: the cross, the agony prolonged, the surrender into the hands of a Father who had not abandoned him even here.
Antiphon from the Office: "I believe that Providence has spoken; God wills it — that is my motto."
The motto is the man. Providence speaks. God wills. The human being's task is to hear accurately and act faithfully — not to manage outcomes, not to guarantee results, not to ensure that the investment of a life produces a return commensurate with the gift. To hear, to go, to serve, to endure, and if necessary to die. God wills it. That is sufficient.
The man who had been refused the China mission three times, who had finally gone at forty-three as a last-minute replacement, who had spent twenty-nine years in a country whose language he never mastered, who had been betrayed by a man he had corrected and dragged in chains across hundreds of miles and strangled three times on a cross-shaped stake — that man had heard Providence accurately.
Born: August 19, 1748, Grenoble, DauphinΓ©, France Died: February 18, 1820, Wuchang, Hubei Province, China — strangled at the stake Age at death: 71 years Years in China: 29 (1791–1820) Congregation: Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists / Vincentians) Mission territory: Jiangxi, then Huguang (modern Hubei and Hunan) — territory of approximately 270,000 square miles Beatified: May 27, 1900, by Pope Leo XIII Canonized: October 1, 2000, by Pope John Paul II (among the 120 Martyr Saints of China) Feast Day: February 18 (individual); July 9 (collective feast of the 120 Martyrs of China) Relics: Chapel of the Motherhouse of the Congregation of the Mission (Saint-Lazare), Paris Patron: Missionaries; the persecuted Church Spiritual inspiration: Directly inspired Saint John Gabriel Perboyre, CM, martyred in China in 1840
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