Manuel Ruiz López was born in 1804 at San Martín de las Ollas, a village in the mountains north of Burgos. He took the Franciscan habit in 1825 in the Province of the Immaculate Conception and was ordained priest in 1830. Within a year he had asked for the Holy Land: he sailed from Cádiz on 20 July 1831 and landed at Jaffa on 3 August, a missionary of the Custody at twenty-seven.
The Custody sent him to its convent of St. Paul in Bab Tuma, the Christian quarter of Damascus. He had a gift for the languages of the East, and the Arabs of the quarter came to call him, with affection, 'Father Patience'. Ill health forced him back to Europe in 1847; he returned to Syria in 1858 and was made guardian, that is, superior, of the Damascus house, with seven friars under him — five Spanish priests, the Tyrolean Engelbert Kolland, and two lay brothers — and a school for the children of the quarter.
In the spring of 1860 the fighting between Druze and Maronites in Mount Lebanon became a massacre of Christians, and the fear spread to Damascus. On 2 July Ruiz wrote to the Procurator of the Holy Land in Jerusalem describing the city's alarm and closing with the words: may the Lord's will be done. When the mob entered Bab Tuma on 9 July he brought the friars, the schoolchildren and a few laymen — among them the three Massabki brothers, Maronites who worked for the convent — into the church, and told them to stand firm.
That night the attackers came in through a hidden door a traitor had shown them and demanded of each man that he renounce Christ and embrace Islam. Ruiz went straight to the tabernacle and consumed the Hosts so that they could not be profaned; the Spanish Franciscan tradition records his answer, a thousand times rather death, and that he laid his head on the altar. He was the first of the eight friars to die, killed at the foot of the altar where he had just received Communion. His companions were cut down through the convent, Kolland in the street outside, the two lay brothers thrown from the bell tower, the Massabki brothers before the altar steps.
The bodies were thrown into the filth of the streets and recovered only later. Pius XI beatified the eleven on 10 October 1926. Because the cause rested on martyrdom, no miracle was required for the beatification, and on 23 May 2024 Pope Francis approved the votes of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints that dispensed with one for the canonization; at the consistory of 1 July 2024 he fixed the date, and on 20 October 2024 in St. Peter's Square he declared Manuel Ruiz López and his seven companions, and Francis, Abdel Mooti and Raphael Massabki, saints. Their relics rest in an urn in a chapel of the Latin church of St. Paul in Damascus, and their feast is 10 July.