St. Wenceslaus and St. Lawrence Ruiz and Companions

On September 28 the Church permits the commemoration of either St. Wenceslaus or St. Lawrence Ruiz and Companions — two martyr-figures of very different worlds whose memorials fall on the same day.

St. Wenceslaus (c. 907-935), Duke of Bohemia, is the patron of the Czech nation. The grandson of St. Ludmila — herself martyred in 921 — he became duke at the age of thirteen and ruled from Prague, strengthening Bohemian Christianity, introducing Latin-rite priests, and founding the rotunda to St. Vitus at Prague Castle that became the foundation of today's St. Vitus Cathedral. On September 28, 935, he was assassinated at Stará Boleslav by his younger brother Boleslav and his companions, stabbed and run through with a lance during a feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian. He was venerated as a martyr immediately after his death; Emperor Otto I posthumously conferred the regal title, and the English carol "Good King Wenceslas" — written by John Mason Neale in 1853 for St. Stephen's Day — fixed his image in the Western imagination. His relics are enshrined in the St. Wenceslaus Chapel of St. Vitus Cathedral at Prague Castle, along with his helmet and armour. September 28 is a public holiday in the Czech Republic — Czech Statehood Day — and the annual national pilgrimage to Stará Boleslav is the largest Catholic gathering in the country.

St. Lawrence Ruiz (1594-1637) — San Lorenzo Ruiz de Manila — is the protomartyr of the Philippines and the first Filipino saint. Born in Binondo, Manila, to a Chinese father and a Tagalog mother, he was educated by Dominican friars, served as altar boy at Binondo Church, and worked as a scrivener. In 1636, falsely accused of killing a Spaniard, he sought asylum aboard a ship carrying three Dominican priests and a Japanese priest and layman, sailing for Okinawa and then Nagasaki. Arrested in Japan during the Tokugawa persecution, he was martyred at Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki on September 29, 1637, by tsurushi — hung upside-down over a pit and bled — after two days refusing to recant. His last words: "I am a Catholic and wholeheartedly do accept death for God; had I a thousand lives, all these to Him shall I offer." His body was cremated and his ashes thrown into the sea. He was beatified by John Paul II at Rizal Park, Manila, on February 18, 1981 — the first beatification ever held outside the Vatican — and canonized on October 18, 1987, among the sixteen martyrs of Japan. The Minor Basilica and National Shrine of San Lorenzo Ruiz at Binondo Church, Manila, is his principal shrine; the Nagasaki Martyrs' Memorial at Nishizaka, Nagasaki, commemorates the site of his death.