Suggest an Edit — Manuel Ruiz and his 10 companions

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The Martyrs of Damascus, known in the Roman Martyrology as Manuel Ruiz and his ten companions, were eleven Catholic men killed in Damascus on 10 July 1860. Eight were friars of the Order of Friars Minor serving in the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land; three were Maronite laymen of the Massabki family, a well-known Christian household of the city. Their deaths took place during the Damascus massacre, when communal fighting that had begun in Mount Lebanon earlier in 1860 spread to the Syrian capital, then under Ottoman rule. Over several days in July, crowds attacked the Christian quarter, killing a very large number of civilians and destroying churches, convents, and houses. The Franciscan convent of Saint Paul at Bab Touma, which had become a place of refuge, was itself stormed.

Father Manuel Ruiz López, a Spaniard from the province of Burgos, was guardian of the Damascus convent and superior of the community. With him were five other priests—Carmelo Bolta, likewise Spanish; Engelbert Kolland, a Tyrolean of the Austrian Empire; and the Spaniards Nicanor Ascanio, Pedro Soler, and Nicolás María Alberca—and two Spanish lay brothers, Francisco Pinazo and Juan Jacobo Fernández. These men belonged to the long Franciscan mission in the Levant, which combined care of local Catholics with service to pilgrims. Ruiz, born in 1804 at San Martín de Rubiales, had entered the Franciscans in Spain, been ordained, and been assigned to the Custody of the Holy Land before taking charge of the Damascus house.

The three Massabki brothers—Francis (Fransīs), Abdel Moati (Abd al-Muʿṭī), and Raphael (Rūfāʾīl)—were Maronite Catholic merchants of Damascus. Francis, the eldest, was a prominent figure in the city’s Christian community and was remembered for piety and charity. When the assault on the Christian neighborhoods began, the brothers took shelter in the Franciscan convent rather than accept safety on condition of abandoning their faith. Traditional accounts, preserved in the beatification process, hold that they and the friars were pressed to convert to Islam and refused.

On 10 July 1860 the convent was broken into and the eleven men were killed inside the house, according to the acts of the cause by the sword and other violence. They were buried at the convent. The massacre as a whole drew European and Ottoman attention and formed part of the diplomatic aftermath of the 1860 Syrian crisis. Memory of the eleven was kept by the Franciscans, by the Maronite Church, and by surviving Christians of Damascus. A cause of beatification was introduced in the early twentieth century.

Pope Pius XI beatified Manuel Ruiz and his companions on 10 October 1926. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 10 July. On 20 October 2024 Pope Francis canonized them in Saint Peter’s Square, numbering the eleven among the saints of the Catholic Church. They are venerated especially among Franciscans, among Maronites, and in Spain, Austria, and Syria. Their shrine remains associated with the Franciscan church in the Bab Touma quarter of Damascus.

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