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Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions

Western calendar
9 July
Orthodox calendar
Not kept
Honoured as
Martyrs of China

Zhao Rong was a Chinese soldier in the guard that escorted the French missionary Bishop John Gabriel Taurin Dufresse on his way to execution, and the bishop's patience in suffering moved him to ask for baptism, taking the name Augustine. He became a priest, and in 1815 he followed his spiritual father to torture and martyrdom. With him the Church keeps 119 companions who died in China, 87 of them born there, men, women and children from nine years old to seventy-nine, among them a boy who cried under the threat of being flayed alive, “Every piece of my flesh… will tell you that I am a Christian.” John Paul II made them saints together on 1 October 2000.

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Feast days, two calendars and patron saints

A saint’s feast day is the day each year when the Church remembers that saint in its worship, and for most saints it is the day they died. These are among the oldest days in the Christian year: after Easter and Pentecost, and Christmas and Epiphany in the fourth century, the next feasts the Church kept were those of the apostles and the martyrs.

Many saints have two dates in the finder because the Western and Orthodox Churches built their calendars separately over many centuries. Sometimes they remember the same saint on different days: the West keeps Saint Jude with Saint Simon on 28 October, while the Orthodox keep him on 19 June. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Church, also still follow the old Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the one on our walls, so their 6 December falls on our 19 December. Where that happens the finder gives both dates.

A patron saint is a saint the Church has come to ask for help in a particular place, work or need, “a special intercessor with God and the proper advocate”, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. Some patronages were declared by a pope, as when Pius IX named Saint Joseph patron of the whole Church in 1870; most grew from long tradition, as with Saint Anthony and the things we lose.

We chose the first two hundred saints by what people search for most, by name, by need and by date, and added the saints Orthodox Christians look for and the apostles. Then we added a saint for each of the 138 days that still had none, so every day of the year now has at least one, and forty more of the saints people search for: 378 entries in all. Every fact in an entry comes from a source we checked and name under it: the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Orthodox Church in America’s lives of the saints, Vatican News and the Holy See’s own documents. Where a saint’s story comes to us mostly from legend, the entry says so.