1862 - Jean-Pierre Néel

February 18, 1862

Kaiyang, Guizhou

Jean-Pierre Néel.

Jean-Pierre Néel was born in Lyon, France, in 1832. He led an intense and dramatic life, resulting in his martyrdom at the age of just 30 in a remote corner of China.

As a teenage boy Néel was a sober-minded student of God’s Word. One source says, “From his youth, Jean-Pierre heard his parents talk about the dark hours of the French Revolution when non-[complicit] priests were hunted down like wild beasts. His family had sheltered several of them.”[1] Néel entered the seminary of the Missions Etrangères de Paris and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1858, at the age of 26. During the previous several years a desire to serve Christ in the most needy places on earth had become almost an obsession for the young Frenchman. He was assigned to Guizhou Province in China, where there had already been numerous martyrdoms of missionaries and their Chinese converts in years past. Néel knew that by going to China he was effectively signing his own death warrant, but he was ready and willing to follow Christ regardless of the cost.

After spending one year in language study, Néel was appointed pastor of about twenty small parishes in the vicinity of Guiyang City. Although today Guiyang is a thriving city of approximately 2.5 million people, in those days it was little more than a collection of villages consisting of people from the Han Chinese, Miao, Bouyei, and other ethnic groups. Ministry was difficult and dangerous. In a letter to a friend, Néel wrote,

“For at least a year, Guizhou Province has been badly disrupted. In addition to the scourge of civil war, there is a famine in some places obliging a certain number of destitute people to feed on human flesh. Isn’t that horrible? The plague is also rampant in a large part of my district. The surroundings of the capital are filled with destitute families who have emigrated because of the rebels.”[2]

In 1861 Néel started a new outreach. His letter to Catholic sisters on November 3, 1861, revealed the danger at the time:

“The Christians are very timid; the pagans profit from this by inflicting all kinds of insults. But the hatred of the pagans is displayed especially towards the European devils. This is what they call us, since they don’t dare attack us directly, they attack our Christians instead.”[3]

Néel was arrested along with four Chinese Catholics, when a mob of a hundred men, some on horseback, descended on the place they were staying. The local magistrate was with the mob. He “tied the French missionary’s pigtail to the tail of the horse. He was made to walk or run according to the whim of the horseman to the great joy of the troop.”[4] Another account says Néel was “tortured very cruelly by the official persecutors of religion, and threatened with death unless he would betray his faith in God. He replied: ‘If you want to kill me, do it now; to betray my God is impossible!’”[5]

The group of five Christians was beheaded, starting with Jean-Pierre Néel. It was said that immediately after Néel died,

“a beam of light appeared in the sky. The officials and all the non-Christians there saw it and were surprised. The persecutors hung the heads of the five martyrs on the town gate as a warning to the people against faith in the Christian religion, but some Catholics by night secretly removed them and put them in one coffin, which they then buried in the old tomb of the deceased Bishop Pai.”[6]

1. “The Martyrs of China 1648-1930,” Tripod, 24.
2. “The Martyrs of China 1648-1930,” Tripod, 25.
3. “The Martyrs of China 1648-1930,” Tripod, 25.
4. “The Martyrs of China 1648-1930,” Tripod, 27.
5. CRBC, The Newly Canonized Martyr-Saints of China, 90-91.
6. CRBC, The Newly Canonized Martyr-Saints of China, 90-91.