Lorenzo Ruiz

Lorenzo Ruiz was born in the early seventeenth century in Binondo, a Chinese-Filipino quarter of Manila in the Spanish Philippines, to a Chinese father and a Filipino (Tagalog) mother. Raised a Catholic, he was formed by the Dominican friars of Binondo Church, where he served as an altar boy and later as a clerk and calligrapher, writing in Spanish and Chinese. He belonged to the Confraternity of the Most Holy Rosary attached to that church. As a layman he married and had three children, two sons and a daughter, and supported his household by his work as a sacristan and professional scribe. He was not a priest or a professed religious, though his life was closely bound to the Dominican mission in Manila.

In 1636 he was accused of involvement in the killing of a Spaniard. Whether the charge was true cannot be established from surviving evidence; what is clear is that Ruiz believed he would not receive a fair hearing and sought protection with a party of Dominican missionaries about to leave the islands. The group, associated with the Spanish Dominican Antonio González, included priests, a Japanese Dominican, and other lay companions. Their voyage carried them into Japan at the height of the Tokugawa shogunate’s campaign against Christianity. After landing in the Ryukyu Islands they were arrested, taken to Nagasaki, and imprisoned as illegal missionaries and Christians.

In Nagasaki the prisoners were interrogated and tortured to obtain apostasy. The methods included water torture and, finally, tsurushi: hanging the victim upside down in a pit, often with a cut made in the forehead so that death would not come too quickly from blood pressure in the head, one hand left free to signal recantation. Ruiz refused to deny his faith. Witnesses later recorded that he declared himself a Catholic and said that, had he a thousand lives, he would offer them all to God. He died in the pit on 29 September 1637. In keeping with the authorities’ policy of preventing the veneration of relics, the bodies of Ruiz and his companions were burned and the ashes thrown into the sea.

The cause of Ruiz and fifteen companions (Dominican priests and brothers and laypeople martyred in the same persecution) was examined in the twentieth century. Pope John Paul II beatified them in Manila on 18 February 1981, the first beatification ceremony held outside Rome, and canonized them in Saint Peter’s Square on 18 October 1987. Lorenzo Ruiz thus became the first Filipino raised to the honours of the altar. The Catholic Church keeps their memorial on 28 September. He is widely invoked in the Philippines as a patron of the nation, of Filipino youth, of overseas Filipino workers, and of altar servers, and Binondo remains a principal centre of his cult.