Jeanne-Marie Guerguin

Jeanne-Marie Guerguin, known in religion as Marie of Saint Natalie (Marie de Sainte-Nathalie), was a French Roman Catholic sister of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary and one of the Martyr Saints of China. She was born in 1864 at Belle-Isle-en-Terre in Brittany (in the department then called Côtes-du-Nord, now Côtes-d'Armor), into a poor rural family, and was the eldest of five children. After her mother’s death while she was still young, she helped raise her siblings and later worked as a domestic servant. Despite a life of hard labor and limited schooling, she formed a religious vocation and, in the 1880s, entered the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, the missionary congregation founded in 1877 by Hélène de Chappotin de Neuville (Mother Mary of the Passion). She took the name Marie of Saint Natalie and was trained in that institute’s Franciscan spirituality and its work among the poor, including overseas missions.

In 1899 she was sent to Shanxi in northern China, where the Franciscan bishop Gregorio Grassi had invited the sisters to Taiyuan to staff an orphanage and to assist in medical and pastoral work. She went with six companions of the same congregation: Sisters Marie Hermine of Jesus, Marie of Peace, Marie Clare, Marie of Saint Just, Marie Adolfine, and Marie Amandine. The small community served abandoned children and the sick at the Taiyuan mission. In 1900 the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising, swept northern China. In Shanxi the provincial governor Yuxian carried out a violent campaign against Christians. European missionaries and Chinese Catholics at Taiyuan were arrested in early July.

On 9 July 1900 the prisoners—including Bishop Grassi, Bishop Francesco Fogolla, Franciscan priests and seminarians, Chinese lay faithful, and the seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary—were taken to the governor’s yamen in Taiyuan and put to death, most by beheading. Jeanne-Marie Guerguin was among those killed that day; she was in her mid-thirties. The Taiyuan massacre became one of the most fully recorded episodes of the Boxer-era killings of Christians in China.

The Shanxi martyrs of 1900, including Guerguin and her six companions, were beatified by Pope Pius XII on 24 November 1946. They were canonized on 1 October 2000 by Pope John Paul II among the 120 Martyr Saints of China. Their collective feast in the Roman Martyrology is 9 July. She is remembered as a Breton laywoman who became a missionary sister and died for the Christian faith during the Boxer Rebellion.