Saint Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse

Louis Gabriel Taurin Dufresse, MEP (8 December 1750 – 14 September 1815) was a French Catholic prelate who served as Vicar Apostolic of Se-Ciuen from 1801 to 1815. He was member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. Murdered for his faith, he is one of the 120 martyrs of China, canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 1, 2000, on the feast of Thérèse of Lisieux, patron saint of the missions. Dufresse was born at Ville-de-Lezoux, Diocese of Clermont, France. He attended the parochial school of his village, and then continued his studies at the college of Riom. He then left for Paris, studying first at Louis le Grand, then at the seminary of Saint Sulpice. At the college, he learned about the Paris Foreign Missions Society from one of his teachers, the Abbé Jean-Didier de Saint Martin, who later left for China. He joined the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris seminary as a deacon in July 1774 and was ordained a priest on 17 September 1774. Father Dufresse was sent as a missionary to Sichuan (formerly spelled Szechwan, a.k.a. Se-Ciuen or Setchoan), West China in December 1775. In 1776 he left Macau to go inland and reached Szechwan after more than three months of travel. He was then imprisoned once in Peking and released. As soon as he had learned enough of the Chinese language, Bishop Pottier sent him to the north of the province. At the end of 1784, an anti-Christian persecution broke out. Dufresse was arrested and managed to escape to a friendly Christian house. There he received a note from the coadjutor bishop, Monsignor de Saint-Martin, inviting him to give himself up in order to calm the unrest. He obeyed and left for Tchen-Tou where he arrived on February 27, 1785, where he was imprisoned for a few weeks before being transferred to Peking with Bishop de Saint-Martin and two other missionaries, Delpon and Devaux. There he underwent many painful interrogations before finally being released on November 9, 1785.