Jean-Gabriel Perboyre was born on 6 January 1802 at Le Puech, in the commune of Montgesty near Cahors in southern France, the son of the farmers Pierre Perboyre and Marie Rigal. He was one of eight children in a household that would give the Church three missionaries of Saint Vincent de Paul and two Daughters of Charity. In that simple, hardworking home he breathed in the faith, sound and unpretentious values, and the sense that life is a gift to be given away.
In adolescence, He who "calls by name" seemed to pass him by. It was his younger brother Louis who was received, in 1816, into the little seminary recently founded at Montauban by their paternal uncle, Jacques Perboyre, a Vincentian. Jean-Gabriel was simply asked to accompany the boy for a time until he grew accustomed to the new surroundings. He had come, as it were, by accident, and was expected to leave soon; but the accident opened unexpected horizons before the astonished young man, and in the seminary he found his own road. His teachers, struck by his intelligence and piety, urged him to enroll. He wrote to his father, offering to come home and work the farm if he were needed, but confessing that he believed God was calling him to the priesthood. His parents, surprised, gave him their blessing and their whole-hearted encouragement.
The Church of France had only just emerged from the Revolution, clothed in the purple of the martyrs but grieving over the apostasy of many: churches ruined, religious houses plundered, souls without shepherds. It is not surprising, then, that the priesthood appeared to this young man not as a comfortable career but as the destiny of heroes. From 1818 the missionary ideal ripened in him, and in those days mission meant above all China—a distant mirage, and a departure with no return to the scents and affections of home. He chose the Congregation of the Mission, founded by Saint Vincent de Paul in 1625 to evangelize the poor, to form the clergy, and above all to drive the missionaries themselves toward holiness. Mission is not propaganda: the Church has always demanded that heralds of the Word be interior men, mortified, filled with God and with charity, for a lamp cannot lighten the darkness of man if the oil is lacking. Jean-Gabriel took no half measures. If he became a martyr, it is because he first became a saint.
He entered the novitiate of the Congregation at Montauban in December 1818, and on the feast of the Holy Innocents in 1820 he made the four promises of the Congregation, hoping already for the overseas missions. He was ordained a priest on 23 September 1825 in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity by Bishop Louis Dubourg, himself a seasoned missionary newly returned to France, and offered his first Mass the next day. For years his mission was at home in France: a model novice and student, then a formator of seminarians, and from 1832 director of the novitiate in Paris. Fragile health held him back from the China he desired.
Once more it was his brother Louis who changed the course of his life. Louis, too, had entered the Congregation of the Mission and had asked for China, where the sons of Saint Vincent already had a martyr in Blessed François-Régis Clet, put to death on 18 February 1820. But during the voyage Louis, only twenty-four years old, was called to the mission of heaven. All that the young man had hoped and done would have seemed wasted had not Jean-Gabriel asked to take his brother's place in the breach. His request was granted, in the hope that the sea voyage might even strengthen him.
He reached Macau in August 1835 and set himself to the Chinese language. On 21 December 1835 he began the long journey to his assigned mission, traveling by junk, on foot and on horseback, until he arrived in Henan, at Nanyang. In the West almost nothing was then known of the Celestial Empire, and the ignorance was returned in kind; between the two civilizations lay a dark furrow, and someone had to cross it, bearing on himself the evil of many and burning it away in charity. Within a few months he could make himself understood in good Chinese, and he threw himself into the ministry, visiting the scattered little Christian communities. In January 1838 he was transferred to Hubei, in the region of the lakes formed by the Yangtze. Despite his intense apostolate he suffered greatly in body and in spirit. "No," he wrote, "I am no worker of wonders here in China, any more than I was in France. Ask for my conversion and my sanctification, and the grace that I may not spoil His work too much." To onlookers it seemed inconceivable that such a missionary should be walking in a dark night; but the Holy Spirit was preparing him, in the emptiness of humility and the silence of God, for the supreme witness.
In 1839 two apparently unrelated events darkened the horizon. The first was the outbreak of persecution, the Christian religion having been proscribed by imperial decree in 1794; the viceroy of the province set the local mandarins to extract the names of priests and catechists. The second was the outbreak of the Anglo-Chinese conflict known as the Opium War (1839–1842), which poisoned the air still further. The missionaries were on the alert, but too many false alarms had dulled their vigilance. So it was on 16 September 1839 at Cha-yuen-ken, where Perboyre was staying together with his confrere Baldus, the Franciscan Rizzolati, and the Chinese priest Father Wang. A column of about a hundred soldiers was reported; the priests underestimated the warning and prolonged their fraternal conversation. When there was no longer any doubt about where the soldiers were going, it was late. Baldus and Rizzolati fled far off; Perboyre hid nearby, among the bamboo forests and hidden caves of the neighboring mountains. But the soldiers, by threats, forced a catechumen to reveal where the missionary was concealed. He was a weak man; he was not a Judas.
So began the Calvary of Jean-Gabriel. Stripped of his garments and dressed in rags, bound and dragged from tribunal to tribunal, a prisoner had no rights and no protection of law: since he was under arrest he was presumed guilty, and if guilty he could be punished. At the first trial, at Kou-Ching-Hien, his answers were epic. "Are you a Christian priest?" "Yes, I am a priest, and I preach this religion." "Will you renounce your faith?" "I will never renounce the faith of Christ." When they demanded that he betray his fellow believers, he was silent, for a witness of Christ is no informer.
At Siang-Yang the interrogations grew harsher. He was held for hours kneeling on rusted iron chains, suspended by his thumbs and his hair from a beam in the torture called the hangtzé, and beaten repeatedly with bamboo rods. Yet more than the violence, he was wounded by the mockery of everything he believed: the hope of eternal life, the sacraments, the faith itself. The third stage was at Wuchang, where he was summoned before four different tribunals and subjected to twenty interrogations, each blending torture with the cruelest derision. Christians were forced to apostatize, and some even compelled to spit upon and strike the missionary who had brought them the faith. Because he would not trample on the crucifix, he received a hundred and ten blows of the pantsé. The most terrible accusation was that of immoral relations with a Chinese girl, Anna Kao, who had made a vow of virginity; he defended himself firmly—she was neither his mistress nor his servant, and Christianity honors woman rather than degrades her—but he remained deeply troubled that innocent people should suffer on his account. The cruelest judge of all was the viceroy, who raged against a man already reduced to a shadow, demanding confessions and denunciations; but as the body weakened, the soul grew strong, and his hope was now the meeting with God whom he felt nearer each day.
The death sentence was confirmed by imperial edict, and on 11 September 1840 Jean-Gabriel Perboyre was led out at Wuchang with seven common criminals. Bound to a cross, he was strangled to death, thirty-eight years old, made in his dying the very image of the crucified God he had crossed the world to preach. A catechist recovered his body and buried it in the mission cemetery.
The fame of his martyrdom spread quickly. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in Rome on 10 November 1889, the cause for his canonization was formally opened on 11 March 1891, and Pope John Paul II canonized him on Trinity Sunday, 2 June 1996, together with Egidio Maria of Saint Joseph and Juan Grande Román. His remains were brought back from China to France and are venerated in the chapel of the Vincentian Motherhouse in Paris, the chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul. His feast is kept on 11 September, the day of his death. He left behind a prayer that sums up his whole life: "O my Divine Savior, transform me into Yourself… Grant that I may live but in You, by You and for You."
May Saint Jean-Gabriel Perboyre obtain for us the courage to answer God's call without half measures, and teach us today to bear our own small cross with the silence and constancy that never betrays Christ or neighbor.
