Engelbert Kolland

Engelbert Kolland was born on 21 September 1827 in Ramsau, in the Tyrol region of the Austrian Empire. Little detailed information has been preserved about his childhood or family background. He entered the Order of Friars Minor, commonly known as the Franciscans, and received the religious name Engelbert. After his formation in the order he was ordained a priest. He was then sent to the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, which since the medieval period had been entrusted with the care of the Christian holy places and with ministry to Catholics in Palestine, Syria, and neighboring regions of the Ottoman Empire. Kolland was assigned to the Franciscan community in Damascus, where the friars maintained a convent in the Christian quarter of the city and served a Latin-rite parish as well as pilgrims and local faithful.

In the mid-nineteenth century the Christian population of Damascus included Greek Orthodox, Melkite, Maronite, and smaller Latin-rite communities. They lived under the Ottoman millet system, which granted a degree of communal autonomy but left them exposed in times of political or sectarian crisis. In 1860, civil war in Mount Lebanon between Druze and Maronite Christians produced a series of massacres. Refugees and news of the killings reached Damascus, and in July the violence spread to the Syrian capital. On 9 July 1860, large-scale attacks began on the Christian neighborhoods. Over the next days thousands of Christians were murdered, and churches, monasteries, and houses were looted and burned. European consulates were also targeted. The Franciscan convent became a place of refuge for Christians seeking protection.

On 10 July 1860 the convent itself was stormed. The guardian of the community, Manuel Ruiz, and the other friars present, including Engelbert Kolland, were taken prisoner, as were three Maronite laymen of the Massabki family who had taken shelter there. Accounts assembled for the later beatification process report that the captives were called upon to renounce Christianity and to accept Islam, and that they refused. They were then put to death. Kolland was thirty-two years old. The killing in Damascus was eventually stopped, notably through the intervention of Abd al-Qadir, the Algerian emir then residing in the city, who used his influence and his followers to protect many Christians, and through the subsequent action of Ottoman authorities and the landing of French troops in the region.

The eight Franciscan friars of several nationalities and the three Maronite brothers were thereafter venerated as the Martyrs of Damascus. Pope Pius XI beatified them on 10 October 1926. Their feast day in the Catholic Church is 10 July. They were canonized by Pope Francis on 20 October 2024. Engelbert Kolland is honored as a saint and martyr, a representative of the Franciscan missionary presence in the nineteenth-century Holy Land and of the Christian communities that suffered in the 1860 massacres in Syria and Lebanon.