Saints Lawrence Ruiz and Companions, Martyrs

Lorenzo Ruiz was born in Manila about 1600 to a Chinese father and a Filipino mother, worked as a calligrapher for the Dominicans and was married with three children. In 1636, accused of killing a Spaniard, he took refuge on a ship carrying Dominican missionaries, which brought them to Okinawa and then to Japan, where Christianity was banned. Arrested, they were taken to Nagasaki and tortured; in the end they were hung head down over a pit, and Lorenzo died there on 29 September 1637. He is remembered with fifteen companions killed in Japan between 1633 and 1637: Dominican priests and brothers from Spain, Japan, France and Italy and Japanese lay people. Canonized in 1987, he is the first Filipino saint.