Joaquín Royo Pérez

Joaquín Royo Pérez, known in English as Joachim Royo, was a Spanish priest of the Order of Preachers, a missionary in Qing-dynasty China, and a Catholic martyr. He was born in 1691 in Hinojosa de Jarque, a town in the province of Teruel in Aragon. He entered the Dominicans, was ordained, and followed the established Spanish Dominican route to East Asia by way of the Philippines. He was then assigned to the mission in Fujian, the province where the Order of Preachers had long concentrated its work among Chinese Christians. He spent the greater part of his adult life there, in a period when imperial law treated Catholic preaching as illicit.

In Fujian he served a largely clandestine apostolate: administering the sacraments in private, instructing catechumens, and supporting local Catholic families who themselves risked punishment. He worked alongside other Spanish Dominicans, notably Pedro Sanz, vicar apostolic of Fujian, and the priests Francisco Serrano, Juan Alcober, and Francisco Díaz. After the Chinese Rites controversy and successive edicts under the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors, the legal position of missionaries and converts worsened. In the mid-1740s the provincial authorities moved against the Dominican mission. The priests were identified, arrested, and imprisoned in Fuzhou, where they were interrogated and pressed to apostatize and to name Chinese Christians.

Pedro Sanz was condemned and beheaded in Fuzhou on 26 May 1747. Royo and the remaining Dominican priests were held for more than a year. On 28 October 1748 they were put to death by strangulation in Fuzhou. Contemporary reports and the later cultus of the Order present their deaths as a refusal to abandon the faith. Memory of the five Dominicans was kept by Chinese Catholics in Fujian and by the Order of Preachers; their cause proceeded as a group of missionary martyrs of the eighteenth-century China mission.

Pope Leo XIII beatified Joaquín Royo together with Pedro Sanz and their Dominican companions on 14 May 1893. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him among the 120 Martyrs of China (Augustine Zhao Rong and companions), a group that includes missionaries of several institutes and many Chinese lay faithful, priests, and religious killed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In the General Roman Calendar that group is commemorated on 9 July. Royo is remembered as a central figure of the eighteenth-century Dominican mission in Fujian and as one of that larger company of Chinese martyrs.