Peter Wu Guosheng

Peter Wu Guosheng (Chinese: 吳國盛) was a Chinese Catholic layman and catechist martyred in the early nineteenth century under the Qing dynasty. He was born in 1768 in the village of Longping, in Zunyi prefecture of Guizhou province in southwestern China. He grew up in a non-Christian household. As an adult he encountered Catholic teaching in a region where Christian communities were small and often isolated. In 1796 he was baptized and received the name Peter. Guizhou lay far from the older coastal mission centers; imperial edicts restricted foreign clergy, so local catechists carried much of the work of instruction and pastoral care.

After baptism he became a catechist, teaching doctrine, preparing others for the sacraments, and supporting Catholics around Zunyi. Hagiographical accounts describe him as a man of upright character who sought to share the faith despite the legal and social risks. Catholicism was at best barely tolerated and often treated as a prohibited sect. Catechists such as Wu therefore worked under the constant possibility of denunciation and arrest.

In 1814, during the Jiaqing reign, persecution of Christians intensified in Guizhou. Wu was arrested for his religious activity and for refusing to abandon the Catholic faith. Qing procedure in such cases commonly included pressure to recant, including demands to trample Christian symbols. He would not apostatize. He was condemned and executed by strangulation on 7 November 1814 in Zunyi, at about forty-six years of age. Strangulation was a prescribed form of capital punishment in the Qing code and was used against several Chinese Catholic martyrs of that era.

His cause was later joined to those of other Chinese martyrs from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. He was beatified on 2 May 1909 by Pope Pius X. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him among the one hundred twenty Martyrs of China, whose deaths range from 1648 to 1930. They are commemorated together in the General Roman Calendar on 9 July as Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions. Among Chinese Catholics they are remembered as witnesses to the Church’s survival through successive waves of imperial persecution.