Lambert Trouvez was born in 1585 at Beignée, a hamlet of Ham-sur-Heure in the Principality of Liège, in the Walloon country of what is now Belgium. His family was of modest condition, and after his first schooling the boy was apprenticed to a tailor. God, however, had cut out for him a different pattern of life. Drawn to religious life, at nineteen he entered the Friars Minor at the convent of Nivelles in 1604. With the habit he received a new name, Richard of Saint Ann — a name chosen, tradition says, in memory of what his mother used to tell him: that as a child he had been saved from wolves through the intercession of Saint Anne. From then on his whole life would be a thanksgiving for a deliverance he had not earned.
For a time the young friar simply went on plying his trade of tailor within the cloister, sanctifying an ordinary craft by obedience. But the reform movement of the Recollects, with its stricter poverty and its missionary fire, drew him irresistibly, and in 1606 he obtained permission to be sent to Italy. From there he set out for the mission lands. Destined for the "East Indies" and the far horizons of the New World, he was sent to Spain and was received into the Franciscan province of Madrid — which is why he is often known by the Spanish form of his name, Ricardo de Santa Ana. In 1608 he sailed for Mexico, and from Mexico he passed to the Philippines.
His superiors recognized in him great spiritual and pastoral gifts, and so, though he had come to the Order as a workman, they had him undertake the studies necessary for the priesthood. He was ordained a priest at Cebu in 1611. The heart of his vocation was now clear to him: Japan, where the Church was under savage persecution, where missionaries had been banished, and where every priest who entered did so with his death sentence already written. Richard went there nonetheless, and in 1617 he returned to that country a second time. For four years he exercised his ministry clandestinely, moving in secret among the hidden Christians, celebrating Mass, absolving, encouraging, and strengthening a flock that risked everything to receive him.
At the end of 1621 he was betrayed and denounced, arrested along with some thirty companions. He was taken to the prison of Ōmura and shut for long months in a narrow cage, exposed to the weather, cramped and helpless — a slow martyrdom before the swift one. He did not waver. On 10 September 1622, at Nagasaki, he was burned alive together with a great company of fellow sufferers: foreign missionaries of various religious orders, Japanese and Korean laypeople, women and children. Others among them were beheaded. In all, fifty-two Christians were put to death that day, in what the Church remembers as the Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki.
With his companions, Brother Richard of Saint Ann was declared a martyr and beatified on 7 July 1867 by Pope Pius IX. His memory never left his native soil. The house where he was born, in the rue Ranwez at Beignée, still stands, and the church of Saint Martin at Ham-sur-Heure keeps an altar dedicated to the blessed martyr. Since 2003 an annual procession, the "March of Blessed Richard," once again winds through the streets of the village, as it often did in the 1970s, so that the tailor's apprentice who became a missionary and a martyr should go on walking among his own people.
Let us ask Blessed Richard of Saint Ann to obtain for us his quiet courage, and today let us do one hidden, ordinary duty with the same love that carried him from a tailor's bench to the fires of Nagasaki.
