Wawrzyniec Wang Bing

Wawrzyniec Wang Bing (Chinese: 王炳; pinyin: Wáng Bǐng), known in Latin as Laurentius Wang Bing and in English as Lawrence Wang Bing, was a Chinese Catholic layman, catechist, and martyr of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1802 in Qionglai, in Sichuan province, then under the Qing empire. A farmer by occupation, he is recorded in the hagiographical tradition as a married layman. After the death of his wife he gave himself to the work of a catechist, a lay ministry of teaching and pastoral care that was indispensable in the Catholic missions of southwestern China, where ordained priests were few and village communities were widely scattered.

In the middle of the nineteenth century he left his native Sichuan for the neighboring province of Guizhou, a mission field of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. There he served alongside other Chinese Catholics, notably the catechist Jerome Lu Tingmei and Agatha Lin Zhao. Catechists instructed catechumens, led prayer in the absence of clergy, and held local congregations together during long intervals between missionary visits and during bouts of official hostility. Christianity remained legally precarious under the Qing, and lay leaders were often the first to be seized when magistrates or local elites launched campaigns against the Church.

A persecution broke out in Guizhou in 1857–1858. Wang Bing was arrested together with Jerome Lu Tingmei and Agatha Lin Zhao. All three refused to apostatize. On 28 January 1858 they were put to death by beheading at Maokou in Guizhou. Contemporary reports of the Paris Foreign Missions recorded the execution and later supported the introduction of their cause in Rome. Their deaths belong to the wider series of nineteenth-century Chinese martyrdoms that preceded the better-known Boxer-era killings of 1900.

Pope Pius X beatified Lawrence Wang Bing on 2 May 1909, together with a larger group of Chinese martyrs of that century. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him in Rome as one of the one hundred and twenty Martyr Saints of China, liturgically grouped with Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions. Their memorial in the General Roman Calendar is 9 July; some martyrologies also note 28 January, the day of his death. He is venerated as a lay witness of the faith in nineteenth-century China. No distinct personal patronages are commonly attached to him apart from his place among those martyrs.