Jan Martínez Cid — Juan in his native Spanish, and John of Saint Dominic in religion — was born about the year 1577 at Manzanal de los Infantes, in the Spanish province of Zamora, the son of Juan Martínez and María Cid. He was sent to study at the University of Salamanca, and there, in the very city where Dominican learning had shaped the conscience of Spain, the young student found that the truth he was studying asked more of him than admiration. He entered the Order of Preachers at Salamanca and made his religious profession on 24 December 1594, on the vigil of Christmas, binding himself to poverty, chastity and obedience on the night the Word was made flesh.
After his ordination to the priesthood he might have spent a quiet and honorable life in the schools and pulpits of Castile. Instead he offered himself as a volunteer for the missions of the Far East, where the Dominicans were then sending their best men and burying many of them. He left Spain on 21 June 1601 and, after the long and dangerous crossing by way of the Indies, reached Manila on 30 June 1602. He was assigned to Abucay in the province of Bataan, among the Filipino faithful, where he spent six years in patient pastoral labor, learning the people, their language and their needs.
Recalled to Manila, he was named in 1610 superior of a newly founded convent of the Order in that city, and in 1612 he was transferred to Mangaldan in Pangasinan. Wherever obedience placed him — village mission, house of studies, or superior's office — he took up the work assigned without seeking another. Seventeen years of such hidden fidelity in the Philippines prepared him for the brief and decisive act that would crown his life.
The Dominicans resolved to open a mission in Korea. Father John was chosen for the undertaking, and with two other friars he sailed from Manila on 15 July 1618, reaching Nagasaki on 13 August. Preparations for the further journey were begun at once, but the passage to Korea proved impossible. His two companions returned to Manila. He did not. Japan at that hour was in the grip of a fierce persecution of Christians, priests were few, and the flock was scattered and hunted; and for that very reason he determined to remain. He began to study Japanese together with the Italian Dominican Angelo Orsucci, hiding in the house of a Japanese Christian, Cosmas Takeya Sozaburō, so as to be able to speak of Christ to a people who could be killed for listening.
His apostolate in Japan lasted only four months. On the night of 13 December 1618 the two friars were arrested together with Cosmas Takeya Sozaburō, who had sheltered them, and with his neighbors. From the prison there was no release, and none was asked. Father John did not live to see the fire or the sword: he fell ill in confinement and died there on 19 March 1619, worn out by hardship, still a prisoner for the name of Jesus Christ. His host Cosmas and his companion Angelo Orsucci went on to give their blood in the great martyrdom at Nagasaki, and the Church has always counted this quiet death in chains among their number.
Pope Pius IX beatified him on 7 July 1867 in the group of the 205 Martyrs of Japan, whose memory is kept on 10 September. His life teaches what is often harder than dying quickly: the long obedience of seventeen ordinary missionary years, and then the free choice to stay where staying meant prison. He is remembered for zeal for souls, for courage that outlived disappointment when the Korean mission collapsed, for charity toward a persecuted people not his own, and for the patience by which he made his sickbed in a Japanese jail into an altar.
May Blessed John Martínez Cid obtain for us the grace to remain faithfully at the post God has given us, and to choose today, as he did, the harder love rather than the easier road.
