Rémy Isoré

Rémy Isoré was a French Jesuit priest, missionary, and martyr of the Boxer Rebellion. He was born on 22 January 1852 in Bambecque, in the Nord department of northern France near the Belgian border. He entered the Society of Jesus, was ordained a priest, and was sent to the Jesuit missions in China in the later nineteenth century. There he served in the apostolic vicariate of Southeastern Zhili (present-day Hebei), a region in which the Jesuits had long maintained rural stations and Chinese Catholic communities.

By 1900 he was associated with the mission at Wuyi in Hebei. That year the Boxer movement, a militant anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising, spread through northern China. Missionaries and Chinese Christians were attacked as representatives of a foreign religion. Violence reached the Jesuit districts of Zhili in the late spring of 1900.

On 1 June 1900, Boxers killed Rémy Isoré and his fellow Jesuit Modeste Andlauer at Wuyi. Contemporary accounts describe the two priests as having been slain at the mission church. Isoré was forty-eight years old. Their deaths belonged to the wider killing of clergy and lay Christians in Hebei during the Boxer Uprising.

Pope Pius XII beatified Isoré on 17 April 1955 with other martyrs of the 1900 persecution in China. Pope John Paul II canonized him on 1 October 2000 as one of the 120 Martyrs of China, commemorated liturgically as Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions. Their collective feast in the Roman Catholic Church is 9 July. Rémy Isoré is venerated as a saint of the Society of Jesus.