September 11th - Bl. John Gabriel Perboyre, Martyr

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September 11th - Bl. John Gabriel Perboyre, Martyr

THOUGH John Gabriel Perboyre was the first Christian in China to be
beatified (in 1889) he was very far from being the first martyr in
that country. After the re-establishment of the missions there in the
beginning of the 17th century there were only relatively short periods
during which Christians were free from danger. At the end of the 18th
century fierce persecution was carried on, and was continued
sporadically till after the death of Father Perboyre in 1840,
thousands of Christians gladly giving up their lives. Perboyre was
born in 1802, and when he was 15 he was fired by a sermon with the
ambition to be a missionary to the heathen; he joined the Congregation
of the Mission (Lazarists, Vincentians), and was ordained in 1826. At
first his desire to carry the gospel to foreign parts had to give way
before the requirements of religious obedience.

His theological course had been a brilliant one, and so after his
ordination he was appointed professor in the seminary of Saint-Flour,
and two years later rector of the petit séminaire in the same place.
His own personal goodness was very apparent in these employments, and
in 1832 he was sent to Paris to be assistant-director of the general
novitiate of his congregation. At intervals since the taking of his
vows twelve years before he had asked to be sent to China, from whence
reports of the sufferings and heroic deaths of the local Christians
continued to come in, but it was not till 1835 that the permission was
given.

In that year he arrived at Macao, and at once was set to learn
Chinese, for which he showed such aptitude that at the end of four
months he was appointed to the mission of Honan. On the eve of setting
out he wrote to his brethren in Paris:

"If you could see me now in my Chinese 'get-up' you would see a very
curious sight: my head shaved, a long pig-tail and moustaches,
stammering my new language, eating with chop-sticks. They tell me that
I don't make a bad Chinaman. That is the only way to begin making
oneself all things to all men: may we be able thus to win all to Jesus
Christ".

The Lazarists had elaborated a system of rescuing abandoned children,
who are so numerous in China, and bringing them up in the faith. In
this work Father Perboyre was especially active, and he devoted much
of his time to instructing these children, illustrating his lessons by
apt stories to which his very colloquial Chinese gave an added
flavour. After two years at Honan he was moved to Hupeh, and here in
September 1839 there was a sudden and unexplained renewal of
persecution.

The missionaries went into hiding, but a neophyte betrayed Father
Perboyre (with a horrid fitness, for thirty taels--about £9) and he
was dragged in chains from functionary to functionary, each of whom
questioned him and sent him on to someone else. Finally he came into
the hands of the governor and mandarins of Wuchangfu. These required
him to betray the hiding-places of his confreres and to trample on the
cross. The sufferings endured by Father Perboyre were incredible, in
the literal sense of the word. Twenty times he was dragged before his
judges to be bullied into compliance, and more than twenty times he
was tortured because he refused. The ingenuity of the Chinese in
inflicting physical pain is notorious, and Father Perboyre underwent
torments beside which those invented by hagiographers for some of the
martyrs of the Ten Persecutions are crude and clumsy. He was branded
on the face with four characters, which stood for "teacher of a false
religion", and a Chinese priest who bribed his way into his prison
described him as a mass of open wounds, his very bones in places
exposed. On September 11, 1840, almost a year after his capture, Bl.
John Gabriel, with bare feet and only a pair of drawers under the red
robe of the condemned, was strangled with five common criminals. He
was buried beside another Lazarist martyr, Francis Regis Clet, who was
also to be beatified. In China the feast of Bl. John Gabriel is kept
on November 7, the nearest convenient date to that of his
beatification in 1889.

The murder of John Gabriel Perboyre was the occasion of the British
government insisting on a clause in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842
which provided that any foreign missionary who was arrested should not
be dealt with by the Chinese authorities but handed over to the
nearest consul of his nation.

See the anonymous volume which appeared in 1853 under the title of Le
disciple de Jesus; also the biography by Father Huonder, Der selige
Yohann Gabriel Perboyre; L. Castagnola, Missionario martire (1940);
and ....


Saint Quote:
In the way of virtue, there is no standing still; anyone who does not
daily advance, loses ground. To remain at a standstill is impossible;
he that gains not, loses; he that ascends not, descends. If one does
not ascend the ladder, one must descend; if one does not conquer, one
will be conquered.
--St. Bonaventure

Bible Quote:
"Where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are
there." [James 3:16]


<><><><>
MY HAND IN YOURS
Father, take my hand to guide me;
I'm small and very weak--
A child who needs Your guidance
On the road that I do seek.
I can walk the path before me
With the thorns along the way;
But without Your hand I'm sure to find
A price that I can't pay--
I'll trip and stumble, that's for sure.
But You'll be there beside me
To give me sight to follow the way--
To the Kingdom You'll abide Me.