Saint Lorenzo Ruiz

A small, dark-skinned man of about thirty, a poor husband and father from the Philippines, had his hands tied behind his back and his legs bound with heavy rope, and was hung head down in a deep pit full of refuse and excrement. The upper half of his body, from the waist up, was sealed underground by wooden boards cut with half-moon holes fitted tightly around his waist, with stones piled on top to add pressure. The executioners made small cuts in his forehead so that blood would ooze out slowly, easing the pressure in his head; this kept him from dying quickly and drew out his agony for days and nights.

The judge, sitting at the edge of the pit, called down: “If you deny the Christian religion, we will pull you up at once and spare your life so you can go home to your wife and children!” From the dark, suffocating depths of the pit, the man answered firmly:

“I am a Catholic, and I am wholeheartedly faithful to the Catholic faith to my last breath! I offer my whole life to God! Even if I had a thousand lives, I would gladly offer them all to Him!”

The man at the bottom of that pit was Lorenzo Ruiz, the protomartyr of the Philippines. He was not a priest or a monk; he was an ordinary layman, a husband who loved his wife dearly and the father of three young children. By his heroic death in a foreign land, he showed the world that holiness and the courage of martyrdom do not belong to the clergy alone. A lay person in everyday life, with a family to love and a living to earn, can reach the very summit of faith and give glory to God.

He grew up where cultures met: his father taught him Chinese and his mother Tagalog. He was raised and educated by the Dominican friars at the convent of Santo Domingo in Binondo. That church, rebuilt many times, still stands and is now a basilica and national shrine bearing his name. Young Lorenzo served faithfully at Mass, spoke fluent Spanish and wrote a beautiful hand, as neat as print.

When he grew up, he worked as a clerk and copyist (an escribano) for the Dominican friars at the parish church of Binondo. He joined the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, the lay Dominican Third Order, went to Mass every day and prayed the Rosary faithfully. He married a devout native woman named Rosario. Their home was poor but full of laughter and peace. The couple had three children: two sons and a daughter.

Lorenzo was a model husband and father. He copied page after page by hand, earning every coin honestly to feed his family; he taught his children their evening prayers and lived at peace with his neighbors. In the evening, after setting aside his pen and the stacks of papers still smelling of ink, he would sit down with his children and show them their Tagalog letters and the lines of the Hail Mary before the family gathered for their simple meal. No one in Binondo could have imagined that this gentle, soft-spoken clerk was about to set out on a journey that would carry his name far beyond the Philippine islands. His life passed quietly, like that of so many working people in Manila, until a day in 1636 tore all his peaceful plans apart.

Desperate to save his life for his family’s sake, Lorenzo turned to the Dominican priests for protection. Just then a secret missionary party was preparing to sail for Japan to help the underground Church there, which was suffering cruel persecution: three Dominican priests, Father Antonio González, Father Guillaume Courtet and Father Miguel de Aozaraza, with the deacon Vicente Shiwozuka and a lay leper named Lázaro of Kyoto.

There Lorenzo Ruiz and his companions were thrown into a dark prison for more than a year. The Japanese authorities used the most savage tortures to break their will. Lorenzo was given the “water torture”: water was poured down his throat until his belly swelled, then soldiers laid a board across his belly and jumped on it, so that the water gushed back out of his nose, mouth and ears, mixed with blood. Sharp bamboo needles were driven under his fingernails, and then his fingers were broken.

On October 18, 1987, John Paul II canonized Lorenzo Ruiz in Saint Peter’s Square. He became the first saint of the Philippines. The Church celebrates him and his companion martyrs on September 28 each year.