Augustinus Zhao Rong

Augustinus Zhao Rong (Chinese: Zhao Rong; 赵荣), known in English as Augustine Zhao Rong, was a Chinese Catholic priest and martyr of the Qing period. He was born in 1746 at Wuchuan in Guizhou province in southwestern China. In early adulthood he served as a soldier in the imperial army. Traditional Catholic accounts relate that he was assigned to an escort conveying a captured missionary prelate—later identified in hagiography with Bishop Jean-Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse of the Paris Foreign Missions Society—and that the prisoner’s composure led Zhao Rong to seek instruction in the Christian faith. Precise details of that encounter are known only through later ecclesiastical tradition, and the surviving civil record of a common soldier of this period is sparse.

After catechesis he was baptized and took the Christian name Augustine. He left military service, studied theology under missionaries working in Sichuan, and was ordained a diocesan priest for the apostolic vicariate there. He was not a member of a religious order. As a native Chinese priest he ministered among Catholic communities in Sichuan at a time when Christianity was legally prohibited under the Qing code and subject to intermittent, sometimes severe, persecution. His work belonged to the mission field associated with the Paris Foreign Missions Society, which had long been active in the province, though he himself remained a secular priest.

In 1815 a renewed campaign against Christians in Sichuan brought the arrest of numerous clergy and laity. Bishop Dufresse was among those seized and was later executed at Chengdu. Zhao Rong was likewise imprisoned and tortured. He died in prison at Chengdu on 21 January 1815 from the effects of his injuries, and is counted among the martyrs of that year’s persecution in Sichuan. No reliable account of his burial place has been preserved.

Devotion to Zhao Rong developed within Chinese Catholic communities and among missionary societies in the nineteenth century. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1900. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him as the first-named of the one hundred and twenty Martyr Saints of China, a group of eighty-seven Chinese Catholics and thirty-three foreign missionaries who died for the faith between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Their collective memorial in the General Roman Calendar is 9 July. In Catholic memory Zhao Rong stands as an adult convert from the Qing soldiery who became one of the earliest widely venerated native Chinese priests.