St. John Gabriel Perboyre, born in France in 1802, joined the Congregation of the Missions with a great desire to be a missionary. He was ordained in 1826 but was prevented from going to foreign missions due to his excellence at teaching in the seminary. However, in 1835 he was finally sent to China. In China he rescued street children and taught catechumens. But China was an unstable country and the Opium Wars ignited persecutions of foreigners. In 1839 St. John Gabriel was betrayed by a catechumen and then subjected to a year of trials and tortures. He was accused of teaching a false religion, charged to reveal other Christians, made to kneel on rusty iron chains, hung by his thumbs and hair, beaten by bamboo canes, and accused of immoral relations with a Chinese girl. He was sentenced to death by strangulation while on a cross and died a martyr on September 11, 1840.
St. John Gabriel faced persecution in two ways. France was an anti-clerical country after the French Revolution. China was anti-Christian because it associated Christianity with Western culture. Both societies brought him closer to Jesus by their opposition to Jesus and his Church. We are living in a society that is moving in the direction of being anti-Catholic due to Church teaching in which we follow Jesus in matters of marriage, sexuality, and the dignity of the human person at all stages of life. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee ridiculed an effort by the current administration regarding human rights because he believed it would “give preference to discriminatory ideologies.” This is the new label facing the Catholic Church. We are at the start of an era of persecution. We may not be killed, but we will be vilified, yet another kind of martyrdom.
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