Agathe Lin Zhao

Agathe Lin Zhao (also known as Agatha Lin; Chinese: 林昭) was born in 1817 in Qinglong, in Guizhou province in southwestern China, during the Qing dynasty. She belonged to a Catholic family; her father was a convert who had her raised in the Christian faith. In a rural setting where formal schooling for girls was uncommon, she received instruction in Chinese letters as well as in Catholic doctrine. That education later equipped her to teach and to serve as a catechist among the scattered Christian communities of Guizhou.

As a young woman she refused marriage and bound herself by a vow of virginity. She lived as one of the so-called Christian Virgins, a distinctive Chinese Catholic form of consecrated life for laywomen who remained in the world, often in small groups, and devoted themselves to the instruction of girls and the teaching of the catechism. She worked as a schoolteacher and catechist in Guizhou in close cooperation with priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Missions Étrangères de Paris), who staffed the local vicariate. Her duties included educating children, preparing catechumens for baptism, and supporting Catholic households at a time when Christianity was still legally insecure and socially contested in the province.

In the late 1850s local persecution of Christians intensified in parts of Guizhou. Agatha Lin Zhao was arrested together with two fellow catechists, Jerome Lu Tingmei and Laurence Wang Bing. After imprisonment they were condemned for their faith. On 28 January 1858 the three were beheaded at Maokou in Guizhou. Missionary accounts of the period describe her as meeting death with composure. She was about forty years of age.

Pope Pius X beatified her, with a larger group of Chinese martyrs of the nineteenth century, on 2 May 1909. Pope John Paul II canonized her on 1 October 2000 as one of the one hundred and twenty Martyr Saints of China. Their collective liturgical feast is kept on 9 July. She is remembered as a lay consecrated virgin, teacher, and catechist who died for the Catholic faith in nineteenth-century China.