Lucy Yi Zhenmei

Lucy Yi Zhenmei (Chinese: 易貞美), known in the Catholic Church as Saint Lucy Yi Zhenmei, was born on 9 December 1815 in Mianyang, in Sichuan province, then under the Qing dynasty. She came from a Catholic family and is traditionally described as the youngest of five children. In a period when girls in China were seldom given a literary education, she was allowed to study and became well read in the Confucian classics as well as in Christian doctrine and Scripture. After her father’s death she remained with her mother and a brother, contributing to the support of the household through teaching.

As a young woman she declined marriage in order to live as a consecrated virgin. She devoted herself to catechesis, especially among women and children, and was regarded as a capable instructor in the faith. In the early 1860s she left Sichuan for Guizhou in order to assist the French missionary Jean-Pierre Néel of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, who was working among Catholic communities in that province. There she continued her work as a lay catechist rather than as a member of a religious order.

In February 1862 a local campaign against Christians in the Kaiyang area of Guizhou led to the arrest of Néel and several Chinese companions. Lucy Yi Zhenmei was also taken into custody. Brought before the magistrate, she refused to recant. On 19 February 1862 she was condemned and put to death by beheading. She was forty-six years old. She is counted among the Catholics killed in Guizhou in those days and later honored together as martyrs.

Lucy Yi Zhenmei was beatified by Pope Pius X on 2 May 1909. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized her, together with one hundred and nineteen other martyrs of China. In the Roman Martyrology and in local calendars she is commemorated on 19 February, the anniversary of her death; she is also remembered on 9 July, the collective feast of the Martyr Saints of China.