The Church celebrates this Friday, September 11, the memorial of Saint Jean-Gabriel Perboyre, a French Vincentian priest who left his country to evangelize in China and died a martyr in 1840, after months of imprisonment, interrogations, and torture. This year also marks 30 years since his canonization, celebrated by Saint John Paul II on June 2, 1996.
“One thing alone is necessary: Jesus Christ,” Perboyre used to repeat. John Paul II recalled those words during the Canonization Mass, in which he presented the new saint as a priest who wished to follow “Christ the evangelizer of the poor” according to the example of Saint Vincent de Paul and who ultimately identified with Him also in martyrdom.
“What greater desire than to go and preach a crucified God?”
Jean-Gabriel Perboyre was born on January 5, 1802, in Le Puech de Montgesty, in southern France, into a deeply Catholic family from which several religious vocations would emerge. He initially arrived at the school run by his uncle, the Vincentian priest Jacques Perboyre, to accompany his brother Louis, but there he began to discern his own vocation.
In 1818 he entered the Congregation of the Mission, founded by Saint Vincent de Paul, and was ordained a priest on September 23, 1826. During his early years he served as a professor and formator of the clergy in France, although he longed to join the foreign missions. The very decretal letter of his canonization confirms these dates and recalls that his family gave the Church several Vincentian missionaries and religious sisters.
His brother Louis had also entered the Congregation of the Mission and departed for China, but fell ill during the voyage and died before reaching his destination. Jean-Gabriel eventually undertook the same journey and arrived in Macao on August 29, 1835, according to the liturgical calendar of the Congregation of the Mission itself.
Already at the gates of China he wrote words that John Paul II would quote more than a century and a half later during his canonization: “I do not know what awaits me in the course that opens before me: surely many crosses; that is the missionary’s daily bread. And what greater desire than to go and preach a crucified God?”
Perboyre learned the language and later entered the country to serve scattered Catholic communities. Conditions were precarious and the danger of persecution remained ever present. In a letter dated August 10, 1839, he explained that from the previous September until Pentecost he had carried out 17 missions or visits to Christian communities, with almost no rest.
Arrested during a new persecution against Christians
The situation changed a few weeks later. On September 15, 1839, Perboyre was in a mission residence together with fellow Vincentian Jean-Henri Baldus, Italian Franciscan missionary Giuseppe Rizzolati, and a Chinese priest when they received news that soldiers were heading toward them.
The missionaries scattered. Perboyre sought refuge among the bamboo forests of the area, but his hiding place was eventually discovered and he was captured. There followed a prolonged journey through prisons and courts during which he was interrogated and tortured to make him renounce the faith and provide information about other Christians and missionaries.
The priest remained captive for months until confirmation of his death sentence arrived.
The decretal letter of his canonization states that Perboyre suffered martyrdom on September 11, 1840, in Wuhan, bound to a cross-shaped scaffold and strangled. Historical sources of the Congregation place his death specifically in Wuchang, a city now part of Wuhan, in China’s Hubei province.
He was 38 years old.
John Paul II: “Following Christ step by step in His Passion”
Pope Leo XIII beatified Perboyre on November 10, 1889. More than a century later, Saint John Paul II proclaimed him a saint on June 2, 1996, in Saint Peter’s Square, together with Saint Giles Mary of Saint Joseph and Saint John Grande Román.
During the canonization, John Paul II directly linked Perboyre’s missionary vocation with the manner of his death. “Through the daily imitation of his Lord, in humility and meekness, he fully identified with Him. Following Him step by step in His Passion, he reached Him forever in His glory,” he declared.
The Pope recalled that “martyrdom is the culminating moment of his commitment to follow Christ the missionary” and noted the similarity between his death and the Passion: after being “tortured and condemned,” Perboyre went “even to death, and death on a cross.”
At the conclusion of the celebration, John Paul II again addressed the pilgrims who had come to Rome for the new saint: “May the example of Jean-Gabriel Perboyre, who followed Christ on the way of His Passion to proclaim the Gospel in China, spur you to serve God and your brothers and sisters with renewed fervor, in joy and fidelity.”
Four years later, on October 1, 2000, John Paul II canonized Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and 119 other Chinese martyrs, belonging to different eras and including bishops, priests, religious men and women, and numerous laypeople. Perboyre is not part of that group, since he had been canonized four years earlier, but his martyrdom belongs to the same history of the Catholic presence in China, marked for centuries by successive persecutions.