Lorenzo Ruiz of Manila

Life and Ministry

Lorenzo Ruiz was born at Binondo in Manila about AD 1600 to a Chinese father and a Tagalog mother, both Catholic. Educated by the Dominicans of Binondo, he served as a clerk and calligrapher to the parish, married, and had three children. In AD 1636 he was implicated — apparently without evidence, in a dispute with a Spaniard — in a charge of having killed a man, and he took refuge aboard a Dominican mission ship leaving Manila for Japan, not knowing that the ship was bound for the heart of the Tokugawa persecution. With him sailed the Dominican priests Antonio González, Guillermo Courtet, Miguel de Aozaraza, and Vicente Shiwozuka, and the lay catechist Lázaro of Kyoto. The ship was forced by storm into Okinawa, the missionaries were identified, and the whole party was sent to Nagasaki for examination under the anti-Christian edicts of Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu.

Circumstances of Death

At Nagasaki the six men were tortured by the water torture and by the suspension known as the tsurushi, in which the prisoner was hung head-down in a pit. The interrogators offered repeatedly to release any who would renounce Christ and step on the fumi-e (the engraved image of Christ used as a test); Lorenzo Ruiz answered (as the Dominican records preserve) that he was a Christian and would die a Christian for God, and that if he had a thousand lives he would offer them all. He was killed by the tsurushi on 27 September AD 1637, his body burned, and the ashes scattered at sea so that no relic could be venerated. The killing was carried out under the magistracy of Takenaka Uneme, governor of Nagasaki. (The Tokugawa persecution had its own internal political logic — fear of Spanish and Portuguese expansion was real — but Ruiz was a lay catechist who had taken no part in any Spanish enterprise and was killed simply for refusing to renounce Christ.)

Legacy

Lorenzo Ruiz is the first Filipino canonized saint (raised to the altar by John Paul II at Manila in AD 1987 — the first canonization ever held outside Europe) and the patron of the Philippines. His witness is the witness of the layman in the storm: a parish clerk who set sail to escape a colonial court and found himself, instead, set down in front of the test he could not have foreseen, and who answered as if he had been preparing for it his whole life. The thousand lives he would have offered were given in the one life he gave; Christ received it at Nagasaki and the ashes that the sea took were scattered into a Church which now sings him through every Filipino parish in the world.