MIRACULOUS MIRACLES^™

After the peace of Constantine had been proclaimed in the West, the emperor Licinius turned against the Christians of the East, and from about the year 316 required the soldiers of his armies to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death. At Sebaste in Lesser Armenia — the modern Sivas in Turkey — forty soldiers of the Twelfth Legion, the Fulminata or Thundering Legion, refused together. They were young men of proven valor, drawn from many provinces, and neither the promises nor the threats of the prefect Agricolaus could move them from their confession.

In the depth of winter they were condemned to be stripped naked and exposed through the night upon a frozen lake outside the city, while on the shore a bath-house was kept warm and open — apostasy lay only a few steps away. As the cold bit into them the forty prayed with one voice that as forty they had entered the contest, so forty might be crowned. One man broke, staggered to the baths, and died as the heat touched him; but a guard named Aglaius, watching, saw a light from heaven upon the sufferers and crowns descending on their heads, and casting off his clothes he ran onto the ice crying that he too was a Christian, so that the number of forty was not diminished. At daybreak those still breathing had their legs broken; the young Meliton, the last alive, was laid by his own mother onto the cart bearing the dead, that he might not be parted from his companions. The bodies were burned and the ashes thrown into the river, yet the faithful gathered what remained.

Their relics spread across the Christian world with astonishing speed. Within two generations St. Basil the Great preached his famous homily on their feast at Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nyssa composed two discourses in their praise and buried his own parents beside their relics, and St. Ephrem the Syrian sang their eulogy; a Testament of the Forty Martyrs, purporting to be their last instructions from prison, survives in Greek, Syriac, and Latin. In the West, St. Gaudentius of Brescia enshrined particles of their ashes around the year 410, and a fresco of the forty on the ice adorns Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome.

Canonized by the acclamation of the ancient Church long before formal processes existed, the Forty Martyrs remain among the most beloved soldier-saints of Christendom. The East keeps their feast on March 9, deliberately set within the Great Fast as an image of endurance; the Roman calendar honored them on March 10 until 1969, and their memory endures in churches from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to Veliko Tarnovo in Bulgaria, Aleppo, Homs, and Mardin, where a Syriac church dedicated to them is in use to this day.

In the summer of 1480 an Ottoman fleet under Gedik Ahmed Pasha crossed from Albania and fell upon Otranto, the easternmost city of the Kingdom of Naples, gateway of Apulia. The siege began on 28 July; the garrison was small, the walls old, and on 12 August the citadel was stormed. The conquerors put much of the population to the sword or carried them off into slavery, and according to tradition the aged archbishop, Stefano Pendinelli, was cut down in his cathedral, where he had gathered his flock to await the end in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament.

The able-bodied men who survived the sack, reckoned at about eight hundred, were assembled and offered their lives on a single condition: that they deny Christ and embrace Islam. An elderly tailor, Antonio Primaldo, answered for them all, declaring that as Christ had died on the cross for them, so it was fitting they should die for Him, and that it was now time to fight for the salvation of their souls. On 14 August 1480 the prisoners were led in ropes to the Hill of Minerva overlooking the city, and there, one by one, they were beheaded before the eyes of their wives and children. Primaldo was struck first, and a cherished tradition holds that his headless body remained standing upright until the last of his companions had been slain. One Ottoman officer, called Bersabei, was so moved by what he witnessed that he confessed Christ on the spot and was impaled by his own comrades, dying a martyr among martyrs.

When Alfonso of Aragon retook Otranto the following year, the bodies were found on the hill where they had fallen, and the remains were gathered with honor. The greater part now rests in seven great glass cases behind the altar of the Chapel of the Martyrs in Otranto Cathedral, the very church whose floor mosaic and bloodstained altar had witnessed the sack; other relics were carried to Naples, Venice, and Spain. The hill of their death was renamed the Hill of the Martyrs, and a church of Saint Mary of the Martyrs was raised upon it. The cult of the Blessed Martyrs was confirmed when Pope Clement XIV beatified them on 14 December 1771.

On 6 July 2007 Pope Benedict XVI decreed that Primaldo and his fellow townsmen had been killed in odium fidei, out of hatred for the faith, and in December 2012 he approved the miraculous healing of Sister Francesca Levote attributed to their intercession. Benedict announced their canonization on 11 February 2013, the same day he announced his renunciation of the papacy, and it fell to Pope Francis, in the first canonization of his pontificate, to enroll the 813 among the saints in Saint Peter's Square on 12 May 2013, declaring that they refused to deny their faith and died professing the Risen Christ. Their feast is kept on 14 August, the eve of the Assumption, and they remain the patrons and the abiding glory of Otranto.

In the summer of 1572 the Dutch revolt against Spain turned violently against the Catholic Church. The Watergeuzen, or Sea Beggars — militant Calvinist privateers sailing under William de la Marck, Lord of Lumey — had seized Brielle in April, and on 26 June they captured the town of Gorcum (Gorinchem). There they rounded up the friars of the local Franciscan house together with their guardian Nicholas Pieck and his vicar Hieronymus of Weert, two lay brothers, the learned parish priest Leonardus Vechel and his assistant Nicolaas Janssen Poppel, the aged priest Godefried van Duynen, and the Augustinian canon Joannes Lenartz of Oisterwijk. For days the prisoners were abused, exhibited, and pressed to abjure the Catholic faith; Pieck was repeatedly strung up by the neck in mockery before being cut down.

On 6 July the fifteen captives were shipped in filth and derision to Brielle, where Lumey made them march half-naked in procession and dispute with Calvinist preachers. Four more clergy taken in the surrounding country were thrust in among them: the Dominican John of Cologne, parish priest of Hoornaar, who had secretly carried the sacraments to the faithful of occupied Gorcum; the Norbertines Jacobus Lacops and Adrianus Janssen of Hilvarenbeek; and the secular priest Andreas Wouters of Heynoord. Liberty was offered to each man on one condition: that he deny the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the primacy of the Roman Pontiff. All nineteen refused. A letter from William of Orange commanding that priests be left unmolested was ignored, and the magistrates of Gorcum protested in vain.

In the night of 9 July 1572 the nineteen were led to a turfshed in the ruined monastery of Saint Elizabeth at Rugge, just outside Brielle, and hanged from the rafters and beams of the shed. The executions were carried out with deliberate cruelty — the drops were short, the deaths slow, and several of the martyrs were mutilated before and after death. The eldest, the Franciscan Willehad of Denmark, was ninety years old; the youngest were in their twenties. Their bodies were thrown carelessly into two pits, where they lay until Catholics could later recover them.

Devotion to the martyrs of Gorcum began at once and never ceased. They were beatified by Clement X on 14 November 1675, and on 29 June 1867 — the great feast of Saints Peter and Paul, amid the eighteenth centenary of the Apostles' martyrdom — Blessed Pius IX canonized all nineteen. Their relics are venerated in the church of Saint Nicholas in Brussels and at the pilgrimage church of Rugge in Brielle, where the field of their martyrdom remains a national shrine of Dutch Catholicism and the goal of an annual pilgrimage. Their feast is kept on 9 July, and they are invoked especially as witnesses to the Blessed Sacrament and to the See of Peter.

When King Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 and Parliament made denial of the royal supremacy high treason, fidelity to the See of Peter became a capital crime in England and Wales. Over the following century and a half a succession of statutes tightened the noose: the Act of Supremacy, the recusancy laws of Elizabeth I, and above all the Act of 1585 that made it treason for any Jesuit or seminary priest merely to set foot in the realm, and felony for any layperson to shelter him. The forty men and women canonized together in 1970 were chosen from among some two hundred beatified martyrs of this persecution as representatives of them all: thirteen diocesan priests, twenty religious — Jesuits, Benedictines, Carthusians, Franciscans, a Bridgettine, and an Augustinian friar — and seven members of the laity, including three women.

The first to die were the Carthusian priors John Houghton, Robert Lawrence, and Augustine Webster, with the Bridgettine Richard Reynolds, dragged on hurdles to Tyburn on 4 May 1535 and there hanged, cut down alive, disembowelled, and quartered for refusing the oath of supremacy. The same sentence — hanging, drawing, and quartering, the traitor's death — was carried out on most of the forty, at Tyburn above all, but also at York, Lancaster, Durham, Cardiff, Hereford, and elsewhere. Among them were Cuthbert Mayne, protomartyr of the seminary priests (1577); Edmund Campion, the brilliant Jesuit who declared at his trial that in condemning him England condemned all her own ancient bishops and kings (1581); the poet Robert Southwell (1595); and the Welsh schoolmaster Richard Gwyn, protomartyr of Wales (1584).

The laity bore the same witness. Margaret Clitherow, the butcher's wife of York who hid priests in her home, refused to plead and was pressed to death beneath a door loaded with stones on Good Friday 1586, praying 'Jesu, Jesu, Jesu, have mercy on me.' Margaret Ward was hanged for smuggling a rope into prison to free a priest; Anne Line and Swithun Wells died for keeping houses where Mass was said; the layman John Rigby for refusing to attend Protestant worship. Nicholas Owen, the Jesuit lay brother whose ingenious priest-holes saved countless hunted priests, died under torture in the Tower of London in 1606 without betraying a single hiding place. The last of the forty, the Jesuit David Lewis, 'father of the poor' in Wales, was hanged at Usk on 27 August 1679 in the frenzy of the Popish Plot.

Their causes, opened in the nineteenth century after Catholic emancipation, culminated on 25 October 1970, when Pope Paul VI canonized all forty together at St Peter's Basilica — the largest group of English and Welsh saints ever raised to the altars at once. In his homily the Pope held them up not as a reproach to England but as a pledge of reconciliation, praying for the day when Rome and Canterbury would be reunited in the one Church of Christ. Their feast is kept on 4 May in England, joined to the wider company of the English Reformation martyrs, while Wales honours its six among them on 25 October; Tyburn Convent now stands near the site of the gallows, where Benedictine nuns keep perpetual adoration in their memory.

Christianity had taken root in Japan with astonishing speed after Saint Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549, and within a generation the faithful numbered in the hundreds of thousands. But in 1587 the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, unifier of Japan, ordered the missionaries expelled, suspicious that the foreign religion was a vanguard of conquest and an affront to the Buddhist order. The edict slumbered until 1596, when the pilot of the wrecked Spanish galleon San Felipe was said to have boasted that missionaries prepared the way for Spanish arms. Hideyoshi's anger fell at once upon the Church: in December 1596 he ordered the arrest of Franciscans and Jesuits in Kyoto and Osaka, and twenty-six were marked out for death — six foreign Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits, and seventeen Japanese laymen and tertiaries, among them catechists, a physician, a sword-maker, and three boys who served the friars at the altar.

In the depth of January 1597 the condemned had their left ears cut off and were paraded in oxcarts through the streets of Kyoto, Osaka, and Sakai as a public warning. Then began the terrible march of some six hundred miles overland to Nagasaki, barefoot through snow and mockery, that the Christian towns along the way might see and be afraid. The prisoners turned the march into a pilgrimage, singing the Te Deum and encouraging one another. Twelve-year-old Louis Ibaraki laughed at those who offered him his life if he would apostatize, and fourteen-year-old Thomas Kozaki, walking beside his father Michael, wrote to his mother that they were going to heaven and that she should not grieve.

On the morning of 5 February 1597 the twenty-six were led up Nishizaka Hill, which looks down upon the harbor of Nagasaki, where twenty-six crosses lay ready. Each martyr was fastened to his cross with cords and iron rings, the crosses were raised in a long row facing the city, and at a signal the executioners drove lances into each breast, one from either side. From his cross Paul Miki, a Jesuit of samurai blood and the most celebrated preacher of his nation, preached his last sermon: he declared that he was Japanese and died gladly for the Gospel, and that he forgave Hideyoshi and all the authors of his death, desiring only that they receive the baptism he himself had received. The little Louis cried out Paradise, Paradise, and the whole company died calling upon Jesus and Mary while the crowd of Christians below wept and gathered relics of their blood.

The blood of Nishizaka proved the seed of a Church that endured two and a half centuries of hidden fidelity under persecution. Pope Urban VIII beatified the twenty-six on 14 September 1627, and Blessed Pope Pius IX canonized them on 8 June 1862 — the first canonized martyrs of the Far East. Their feast is kept on 6 February as Saints Paul Miki and Companions, and in June 1962, for the centenary of the canonization, the bronze memorial of Yasutake Funakoshi and the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum were raised upon the very hill of their passion, where pilgrims from every nation still climb to honor the protomartyrs of Japan.

When the Tokugawa shogunate closed Japan to the Gospel, the edicts of 1614 and after made the mere presence of a priest a capital crime. Yet the Order of Preachers would not abandon the hidden Church of Japan. Between 1633 and 1637, in successive clandestine missions launched from Manila, sixteen men and women — nine Japanese, four Spaniards, a Frenchman, an Italian, and one Filipino — were taken by the shogun's inquisitors at Nagasaki and its environs. They were priests, cooperator brothers, tertiaries of St. Dominic, and lay catechists; two were women, Magdalene of Nagasaki and Marina of Omura, who had guided and sheltered the missionaries when no priest could walk abroad.

Among them was Lorenzo Ruiz, born at Binondo in Manila of a Chinese father and a Tagalog mother, an altar server and scrivener of the Dominicans, a member of the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary, a husband and father of three. Falsely accused of a killing in 1636, he took passage with a Dominican mission ship expecting to reach safety, and found instead that it carried him to a land where his faith was a death sentence. Arrested at Okinawa with Fathers Antonio González, Guillaume Courtet, Miguel de Aozaraza, the Japanese priest Vicente Shiwozuka, and the lay leper Lázaro of Kyoto, he was brought at last to the tribunal at Nagasaki.

The persecutors' chosen instrument was tsurushi, the torment of the pit: the victim was bound tightly, hung head-downward through a scaffold into a pit of filth, one hand left free to signal apostasy, the temples cut so that the slow pooling of blood would not grant a quick death. Men lingered so for days. Dominic Ibáñez de Erquicia and the brother Francis Shōyemon died so in August 1633; Jacobo Kyushei Tomonaga and his catechist Michael Kurobioye that same month; Luke Alonso and the young Matthew Kohioye in October. Marina of Omura was burned alive in 1634, and Magdalene of Nagasaki hung thirteen days in the pit before she died. In September 1637 came the last company: offered his life for a word of denial, Lorenzo Ruiz answered that he was a Catholic and wholeheartedly accepted death for God — had he a thousand lives, all these he would offer Him. He died in the pit on or about 29 September 1637, and the bodies of the martyrs were burned and their ashes scattered in the sea, that no relics might remain.

Pope John Paul II beatified the sixteen at Rizal Park in Manila on 18 February 1981 — the first beatification ever celebrated outside Rome — and canonized them at St. Peter's Square on 18 October 1987, World Mission Sunday. Lorenzo Ruiz thus became the first canonized saint of the Philippines, patron of Filipinos, of overseas workers, and of the Chinese-Filipino community; his image stands in Binondo Church where he once served at the altar, and the feast of the company is kept on 28 September. At Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki, where so many of them hung over the pits, a shrine and monument to Japan's martyrs now watches over the harbor.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch West India Company seized much of the sugar-rich northeast of Portuguese Brazil, and with the conquest came the Calvinist religion of the occupiers. In the Captaincy of Rio Grande, around the settlement of Natal, the Catholic population was forbidden little at first, but tensions sharpened as the war dragged on, and the Dutch enlisted native Potiguar and Tapuia warriors against the Portuguese colonists. In 1645 command of these auxiliaries lay with Jacob Rabe, a German mercenary in the Company's service, and it was under his direction that the two massacres now honored by the Church took place.

On Sunday, 16 July 1645, the Jesuit-trained secular priest André de Soveral, then about seventy-three years old, was celebrating Mass in the chapel of Our Lady of the Candles at the Cunhaú sugar mill, near present-day Canguaretama. At the elevation of the Host the doors of the chapel were shut, and Rabe's men fell upon the unarmed congregation with swords and clubs, cutting down the priest at the altar together with some seventy worshippers. Of that congregation the Church has canonized Father Soveral and the layman Domingos Carvalho, the two whose names and constancy the inquests preserved.

Less than three months later, on 3 October 1645, the parish priest of Natal, Ambrósio Francisco Ferro, and a company of his faithful — men, women, and children who had been gathered up near the Potengi river — were put to death at Uruaçu, in what is now São Gonçalo do Amarante. The killing there was of studied cruelty: the victims were hacked apart, some had their tongues torn out so they could not pray aloud, and the sacristan Mateus Moreira had his heart ripped out through his back while he yet lived, dying with the words "Louvado seja o Santíssimo Sacramento" — Praised be the Most Blessed Sacrament. With him died named householders such as Estêvão Machado de Miranda, Antônio Vilela, and Manuel Rodrigues de Moura, together with their daughters, a wife, and seven companions of João Martins whose names God alone has kept.

The memory of the thirty never faded in Rio Grande do Norte, where they were long invoked as the Protomartyrs of Brazil. Pope John Paul II beatified them on 5 March 2000 during the Jubilee, and on 15 October 2017 Pope Francis canonized them in Saint Peter's Square — the first martyrs of Brazil to be raised to the altars. Their feast is kept on 3 October; pilgrims gather at the historic chapel ground of Uruaçu in São Gonçalo do Amarante and at the Sanctuary of the Martyrs in Natal, and Mateus Moreira's dying praise of the Blessed Sacrament has made the group a special patron of Eucharistic devotion in Brazil.

When the French Revolution turned against the Church, the Carmel of Compiègne, founded in 1641, stood in the path of the storm. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the decrees that followed outlawed religious vows, and in September 1792 the twenty-one nuns were expelled from their monastery and forced into lay dress. Divided among four lodgings in the town, they quietly kept their Rule, their hours of prayer, and their common life. Under their prioress, Mother Teresa of St. Augustine, the community made a daily act of consecration, offering themselves as a holocaust to appease the anger of God, that peace might be restored to the Church and to France.

In June 1794, at the height of the Reign of Terror, the nuns were denounced, arrested, and imprisoned at Compiègne, then transferred to the Conciergerie in Paris. On 17 July 1794 the Revolutionary Tribunal of Fouquier-Tinville condemned all sixteen as fanatics and enemies of the people — their fanaticism, the prioress observed, being nothing other than their attachment to their holy religion. That same evening they were carted across Paris to the Place du Trône Renversé, chanting the Miserere, the Salve Regina, and the Te Deum as the ordinarily jeering crowds fell strangely silent.

At the scaffold they sang the Veni Creator Spiritus and renewed aloud their baptismal promises and religious vows. The youngest, the novice Sister Constance, knelt for her prioress's blessing, asked permission to die, and mounted the steps singing the psalm Laudate Dominum omnes gentes; each sister followed in turn, the lay sisters and the two Soiron sisters among them, until Mother Teresa of St. Augustine, having watched over each of her daughters to the last, was herself guillotined. Their bodies were thrown into a common pit at Picpus Cemetery, where they rest among more than a thousand victims of the Terror.

Ten days after their deaths Robespierre fell and the Terror ended — a deliverance the faithful have long read as the acceptance of their offering. Pius X beatified the sixteen on 27 May 1906, the first martyrs of the French Revolution to be raised to the altars, and their sacrifice passed into the conscience of the age through Gertrud von Le Fort's novella, Bernanos's drama, and Poulenc's opera Dialogues des Carmélites. On 18 December 2024 Pope Francis, waiving the ordinary process in recognition of their unbroken cult, inscribed them in the catalogue of saints by equipollent canonization. Their feast is kept on 17 July, and pilgrims still pray at the Picpus grave and at Compiègne, where their Carmel's memory endures.

The Gospel took root in Vietnam through Jesuit and Dominican missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and from the first it was watered with blood. Under the Trịnh lords, the Tây Sơn rebels, and above all the Nguyễn emperors Minh Mạng and Tự Đức, the faith was proscribed as tả đạo — the "unorthodox religion" — and its adherents were branded on the face with those very characters. A kingdom-wide edict of January 1833 commanded every subject to renounce the religion of Jesus and prove it by trampling a wooden cross; villages suspected of sheltering a priest were sealed off, searched, and punished collectively, and whole Christian communities were obliterated. The Holy See reckons that between 130,000 and 300,000 of the faithful perished in these persecutions.

From that vast multitude the Church has raised to the altars a representative company of 117: 96 Vietnamese, 11 Spanish friars of the Order of Preachers, and 10 French priests and bishops of the Paris Foreign Missions Society — eight bishops, fifty priests, and fifty-nine laity in all, among them catechists, soldiers, physicians, fishermen, mandarins, a nineteen-year-old seminarian, and one woman, the mother of six Agnes Lê Thị Thành. Six died in the eighteenth century, the rest in the great persecutions of the nineteenth.

Their deaths were as varied as they were terrible. Most knelt beneath the executioner's sword, as did the priest Andrew Trần An Dũng-Lạc, beheaded at the Ô Cầu Giấy execution ground outside Hanoi on 21 December 1839, and the young Frenchman John Théophane Vénard, whose serene letters from his bamboo cage before his beheading in 1861 would inspire Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Others were strangled, burned alive, or, like Joseph Marchand in 1835, put to death by slow slicing; Bishop Ignatius Delgado, exhibited in a cage for public ridicule, died of hunger and exposure while awaiting the sword. Many bore for months the heavy wooden cangue and prison tortures of which they died, refusing to the last to set foot upon the cross.

Beatified in four groups — by Leo XIII in 1900, by Pius X in 1906 and 1909, and by Pius XII in 1951 — all 117 were canonized together by Pope John Paul II on 19 June 1988, as thousands of Vietnamese from the diaspora filled St Peter's Square; the Pope deliberately embraced in that act both the martyrs whose names are known and the uncounted thousands known to God alone. Their memorial, Saint Andrew Dũng-Lạc and Companions, is kept on 24 November in the General Roman Calendar; they are patrons of Vietnam, and their national shrine is the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception at Sở Kiện in Hà Nam, where relics of the martyrs and the instruments of their passion are venerated to this day.

The Church in Korea was born, almost alone among the nations, of lay hands. Korean scholars who had met Christian books brought from Beijing embraced the faith on their own study of them, and when Yi Sung-hun was baptized at Beijing in 1784 and returned home, a hidden church of thousands grew up without a single priest. But the Joseon kingdom, ordered upon Confucian rites, judged a religion that refused veneration of the ancestral tablets to be treason against king and family alike. Wave after wave of persecution followed — in 1801, in the Gihae persecution of 1839, in 1846, and most terribly in the Byeongin persecution of 1866 — and the blood of some ten thousand believers, most of whose names are known to God alone, watered the peninsula. From among them the Church has raised one hundred and three to the altars.

In 1839 the storm broke upon the newly arrived Paris Foreign Missionaries. Bishop Laurent Imbert and Fathers Pierre Maubant and Jacques Chastan gave themselves up to spare their flock and were beheaded at Saenamteo on the bank of the Han River, after the manner of Korean military execution. Outside the Small West Gate, at Seosomun, the lay apostle Paul Chong Ha-sang — who had walked to Beijing nine times to beg for priests and had written to the Pope himself — was beheaded, as were catechists, interpreters, merchants, widows and consecrated virgins, among them the sisters Agnes Kim Hyo-ju and Columba Kim Hyo-im. Others perished in the prisons: Cecilia Yu So-sa, aged seventy-eight, under the lash, and the boy Peter Yu Tae-chol, thirteen years old, who kept the faith through torments his gaolers were ashamed to record.

Andrew Kim Tae-gon, son of the martyr Ignatius Kim Che-jun, crossed thirteen hundred miles to the seminary at Macau and returned as Korea's first native priest, ordained at Shanghai in 1845. Thirteen months later, seized while opening a sea route for missionaries, he was beheaded at Saenamteo on 16 September 1846, twenty-five years old, telling his judges that he had come to die for God, and that eternal life was beginning for him. Twenty years afterward the Byeongin persecution of 1866 swept away Bishop Simeon Berneux, Bishop Antoine Daveluy and seven more French missionaries together with a multitude of Korean faithful; so many were beheaded on the bluff above the Han that it took the name Jeoldusan, the Mountain of Beheading. The last of the hundred and three, the catechist John Yi Yun-il, died by the sword in 1867.

Seventy-nine of the martyrs were beatified in 1925 and twenty-four more in 1968. On 6 May 1984, during the bicentennial of Korean Catholicism, Pope John Paul II canonized all one hundred and three together at Yeouido in Seoul — the first canonization of modern times celebrated outside Rome — naming Andrew Kim Tae-gon, Paul Chong Ha-sang and their companions to the universal calendar, where they are kept on 20 September. Shrines at Seosomun, Saenamteo and Jeoldusan now stand upon the killing grounds, and the church born of lay witness and washed in this blood has grown into one of the most fervent Catholic communities in Asia.

In the spring of 1860 fighting between Druze and Maronites in Mount Lebanon turned into a slaughter of Christians, and by July it had reached Damascus. The Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land had kept a convent in the Christian quarter of Bab Tuma for centuries; in 1860 its guardian was Fra Manuel Ruiz López, a Spaniard of fifty-six who had served in Syria since 1831, and around him lived seven other friars — five Spanish priests, one Austrian priest, and two Spanish lay brothers who kept the sacristy and the kitchen — together with a school for the quarter's children. On 2 July Ruiz wrote to the Procurator of the Holy Land in Jerusalem that the city was in fear, and ended: may the Lord's will be done.

On 9 July the mob entered Bab Tuma. Ruiz gathered the friars, the schoolchildren and some laypeople in the church and urged them to hold firm. Among the laymen were three brothers of a Maronite family, the Massabkis: Francis, a silk merchant with eight children who acted as the friars' procurator; Abdel Mooti, a father of five who taught catechism in the convent school; and Raphael, the youngest, unmarried and given to prayer. In the night the attackers came in through a hidden door that a traitor had pointed out to them. Each of the eleven was told to renounce his faith and embrace Islam, and each refused.

Ruiz ran to the tabernacle to consume the Hosts before they could be profaned and was killed at the foot of the altar. Carmelo Bolta, the parish priest and Arabic teacher, was clubbed to death after repeated demands that he convert; Pedro Soler declared himself a Christian and was run through with a sword; Nicolás Alberca refused and was cut down; Nicanor Ascanio was found in the upper part of the convent and killed there. Engelbert Kolland, the young Tyrolean, got out of the building but was caught, tortured and killed in the street — the only one of the eight to die outside the walls. The two lay brothers, Francisco Pinazo the sacristan and Juan Jacob Fernández the cook, took refuge in the bell tower; they were beaten with clubs and swords and thrown down from it. The three Massabki brothers received Communion and were killed together before the steps of the high altar. The bodies were flung into the filth of the streets and only recovered later, when they were laid to rest with honour.

Pius XI beatified the eleven together on 10 October 1926. Their remains rest in an urn in a chapel of the Latin church of St. Paul, the convent church where most of them died, and every 10 July the Custody carries the relics in procession through the old city, ending at the Maronite church — a remembrance also of the thousands of Damascene Christians, most of them nameless, who died in the same days. On 23 May 2024 Pope Francis approved the favourable votes of the cardinals and bishops of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints for their canonization, without the requirement of a miracle, and at the consistory of 1 July 2024 fixed the date. On 20 October 2024, in St. Peter's Square, with the Maronite and Latin patriarchs present, he enrolled Manuel Ruiz López and his seven companions and Francis, Abdel Mooti and Raphael Massabki among the saints, alongside Giuseppe Allamano, Marie-Léonie Paradis and Elena Guerra, and in his homily counted them with those who had served in martyrdom. Their feast is kept on 10 July.

The Gospel reached the kingdom of Buganda scarcely a decade before the persecution began: the White Fathers arrived at the court of Kabaka Mutesa I in 1879, and young pages and officials of the palace embraced the faith with astonishing fervor. When Mutesa's son Mwanga II took the throne in 1884, the court had become the arena of a three-way struggle between Christianity, Islam, and the old religion of the ancestors. Mwanga, resentful of pages who now answered to a King higher than himself and who resisted his shameful demands upon them, resolved to root the new faith out of his household. The first Catholic to fall was Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, the majordomo who had reproached the king for murdering the Anglican bishop James Hannington; he was beheaded and burned at Nakivubo on 15 November 1885.

The storm broke in full in May 1886. When Mwanga discovered that his pages were still receiving Christian instruction, the young Denis Ssebuggwawo was hacked to death, and the king summoned his court to a judgment: the Christians were commanded to separate themselves. Charles Lwanga, who had succeeded Joseph Mukasa as head of the pages and had secretly baptized the youngest catechumens that very night, stepped forward with his companions. In the days that followed, Andrew Kaggwa the royal bandmaster was cut down with panga and knife, Pontian Ngondwe and Athanasius Bazzekuketa were speared, Matthias Kalemba Mulumba, a judge of some fifty years, was dismembered and left to die over three days, and Noa Mawaggali was tied to a tree and torn by dogs.

The condemned pages were marched some sixteen miles to the customary place of execution at Namugongo, and on 3 June 1886, the feast of the Ascension, they were wrapped in reed mats and laid upon a great pyre. Charles Lwanga was burned apart, slowly, over a small fire built at his feet; he is said to have endured in near silence, saying at the last, 'It is as if you are pouring water on me,' and dying with the words 'Katonda' — my God — on his lips. The youngest, Kizito, a boy of thirteen or fourteen whom Lwanga had baptized days before, went to the flames, it was said, laughing and chattering as if walking to a wedding feast. Anglican converts suffered on the same pyre, companions in blood though not in the canonization; the last of the twenty-two Catholics, John Mary Muzeeyi, was beheaded on 27 January 1887.

The blood of Namugongo proved the seed of one of the most flourishing churches in the world. The twenty-two were beatified by Benedict XV on 6 June 1920 and canonized by Paul VI on 18 October 1964, in the presence of the bishops of the Second Vatican Council — the first canonized saints of modern sub-Saharan Africa. Paul VI himself came as a pilgrim to Namugongo in 1969, the first reigning pope to set foot in Africa, and the basilica raised over the place of the pyre now draws millions of pilgrims from across the continent each 3 June, Martyrs' Day, when Uganda keeps the feast of Saint Charles Lwanga and his companions.

Between 1648 and 1930, one hundred and twenty Catholics — eighty-seven Chinese faithful and thirty-three foreign missionaries — gave their lives for Christ in China. The first was Francisco Fernández de Capillas, a Dominican priest seized during the Manchu invasion of Fujian, who was beheaded on 15 January 1648 while reciting the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary; the Holy See honours him as the protomartyr of China. After the Qing government banned Catholicism in 1724, missionaries who slipped past the river patrols into the forbidden interior did so under sentence of death: Bishop Peter Sanz and four Dominican companions perished at Fuzhou in 1747 and 1748, and under the Jiaqing Emperor's edicts came a fresh harvest — Bishop Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse beheaded at Chengdu in 1815, and Augustine Zhao Rong, a soldier of his escort so moved by the bishop's patience that he sought baptism and priesthood, tortured to death that same year.

Through the nineteenth century the killing continued by strangulation, the executioner's blade, and slow torture. The Vincentians Francis Regis Clet and John Gabriel Perboyre were strangled upon imperial edict in 1820 and 1840; catechists such as Peter Wu Guosheng and Joseph Zhang Dapeng were strangled for refusing to apostatize; the widow Agnes Cao Guiying, the catechist Lucy Yi Zhenmei, and the layman Lawrence Bai Xiaoman were beheaded alongside the French missionary Auguste Chapdelaine, whose death in Guangxi in 1856 shook Europe. Yet the greatest slaughter came with the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, when rebels crying for the expulsion of all foreign influence murdered some thirty thousand Chinese Christians together with hundreds of missionaries.

On 9 July 1900 at Taiyuan in Shanxi, Bishops Gregorio Grassi and Francis Fogolla were cut down with their priests, seminarians, and seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary — among them Mary Hermina of Jesus — in a single massacre before the governor's tribunal. In Zhili, thousands of Christians died; at the village church of Zhujiahe the Jesuits Leo Mangin and Paul Denn were slain at the altar amid their praying congregation, and fifty-two named lay martyrs of that vicariate — the eldest seventy-nine years old, the youngest, Paul Lang Fu and Andrew Wang Tianqing, only nine — were burned, speared, and beheaded. Among them shine the fourteen-year-old Anna Wang, who refused apostasy with the words that she belonged to Jesus, and Chi Zhuzi, an eighteen-year-old catechumen mutilated for pointing to heaven. The roll was completed by Alberic Crescitelli, martyred in southern Shaanxi in July 1900, and the Salesians Bishop Luigi Versiglia and Father Callistus Caravario, shot together on 25 February 1930 while defending young women in their care.

Beatified in successive groups from 1893 to 1983, all one hundred and twenty were canonized together by Pope John Paul II on 1 October 2000 as Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, the first saints of China raised to the altars. Their optional memorial is kept on 9 July, the anniversary of the Taiyuan massacre, and their veneration flourishes wherever Chinese Catholics gather — from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the parishes of the diaspora — a living testimony that the Church in China was planted, as everywhere, in the blood of martyrs.

In the decades after the Mexican Revolution, the Constitution of 1917 stripped the Church of legal standing, and under President Plutarco Elías Calles the notorious "Calles Law" of 1926 made the public exercise of the priesthood a crime. Churches were closed, seminaries suppressed, and priests were ordered to register with the state or abandon their flocks. When Catholics rose in the Cristero War (1926–1929) under the cry Viva Cristo Rey — "Long live Christ the King" — priests who stayed at their posts were hunted as rebels, though many, like Father Cristóbal Magallanes of Totatiche, had preached openly against armed rebellion. The twenty-five martyrs of this company — twenty-two secular priests and three laymen of the Association of Mexican Catholic Youth — were put to death one by one, in villages and barracks scattered across Jalisco, Zacatecas, Durango, Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Chihuahua, between 1915 and 1937.

The first to die was Father David Galván Bermúdez, shot in Guadalajara in 1915 for defending the sanctity of marriage before a revolutionary officer. In August 1926 Father Luis Batis Sáinz was seized at Chalchihuites, Zacatecas, together with three of his young catechists and Catholic Action men — Manuel Morales, a father of three, and the cousins David Roldán Lara and Salvador Lara Puente — and all four were shot by the roadside; Batis pleaded for Morales's life for the sake of his children, and Morales answered that he was dying for God, and God would care for them. Father Mateo Correa Magallanes was executed at Durango in 1927 for refusing to reveal what condemned Cristeros had told him in confession. Father Sabás Reyes Salazar was tortured for days at Tototlán before being shot; Father Rodrigo Aguilar Alemán was hanged from a mango tree in the plaza of Ejutla, answering his executioners' mockery with "Viva Cristo Rey y la Virgen de Guadalupe"; young Father Toribio Romo González was gunned down in his bed at Tequila in 1928.

Their leader, Father Cristóbal Magallanes Jara, pastor of Totatiche and apostle of the Huichol missions, had founded schools, workshops, and — when the government closed the Guadalajara seminary — a clandestine auxiliary seminary in his own parish. Arrested on 21 May 1927 while riding to celebrate Mass at a ranch, he was shot without trial four days later at Colotlán, Jalisco, alongside his young seminary prefect Father Agustín Caloca Cortés. He gave away his few possessions to his executioners, absolved Caloca, and declared: "I die innocent, and ask God that my blood may serve to unite my Mexican brethren." The last of the company to die was Father Pedro de Jesús Maldonado Lucero, beaten to death in Chihuahua on Ash Wednesday of 1937, a decade after the war had formally ended.

Pope John Paul II beatified the twenty-five on 22 November 1992 and canonized them in Rome on 21 May 2000, praising martyrs who "did not stop courageously exercising their ministry when religious persecution intensified in the beloved land of Mexico" and who forgave their persecutors from the place of execution. Their common feast is kept on 21 May, and their cult is vigorously alive: Saint Toribio Romo is invoked throughout Mexico and the United States as an unofficial patron of migrants, and his shrine at Santa Ana de Guadalupe, Jalisco, like the sanctuary of Saint Cristóbal Magallanes at Totatiche, draws thousands of pilgrims each year — living proof that the blood of the martyrs became, as Magallanes prayed, a seed of unity for the Mexican people.