Overview

• Spanish outlets mark today’s feast day with San Lorenzo Ruiz as the leading commemoration, alongside saints such as San Wenceslao.
• Lorenzo Ruiz, born in Binondo (Manila) around 1600, was a lay Catholic associated with the Dominicans and active in the Rosary confraternity.
• Accounts recall the 1633 decree by shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu targeting Christians, after which Ruiz fled Manila with Dominican missionaries and was seized when their ship reached Okinawa.
• He was taken to Nagasaki, ordered to renounce his faith, and executed under the torture known as the horca y hoya used against Christians.
• El Norte de Castilla cites nine Japanese, four Spaniards, one Frenchman and one Italian among his fifteen companions, and reports his beatification in Manila in 1981 and canonization in 1987 by Pope John Paul II.