St. John Gabriel Perboyre would never have considered becoming a priest until he accompanied a younger brother to the seminary and decided to stay, himself.

He was born to faithful farming parents in 1802, in the shadow of the French Revolution and its devastation of the Church. Five of the family’s eight children eventually entered religious life.

As an adolescent, John displayed no extraordinary signs of holiness, but that changed when, in 1816, his parents asked him to accompany his younger brother, Louis, to a seminary founded by their uncle that formed Vincentians, priests who followed the example of St. Vincent de Paul. His parents wanted John to make sure Louis settled in and acclimated to the new life; John discovered that the new life spoke to him as well, and he joined his brother as a seminarian.

John proved to be a bright student, and was promoted to positions of responsibility within his order after he was ordained in 1825. He had a clear desire to serve in the foreign missions, especially China, where Christians were suffering and encouraging the faith. But the Vincentians in France needed him, and he was in poor health, so his requests were denied.

Louis was chosen for the missions in China, but died during his voyage there. John immediately asked to take his place, and received permission to go. He arrived in Macao in 1835 to study the Chinese language, and proceeded to Ho-Nan and Hubei regions to serve the poor there. He helped his order rescue and care for abandoned children—he taught them through stories he told in his broken Chinese.

In 1839, the provincial governor instituted a violent persecution of Christian priests and catechists, and the missionaries in Hubei went into hiding. John was betrayed, arrested, and questioned—authorities wanted him to trample a crucifix and reveal where the other missionaries were hiding. He refused and was tortured horribly, being branded on the face and cut deeply to his bones. On this date in 1840, after a year of captivity and torture, he was strangled on a cross with seven other common criminals.

As a result of his martyrdom, the British government negotiated a clause in the 1842 Treaty of Nanking that required any apprehended missionary to be handed over to the custody of his nation’s diplomatic representatives. John was canonized a saint in 1996.

St. John Gabriel Perboyre, you followed your passion to spread the Gospel and died with faith—pray for us!