Peter Chanel, Missionary in the South Pacific
28 April -- Commemoration
If celebrated as a Lesser Festival,
Common of Martyrs, page 464
Peter Chanel was born at Cras in France in 1803 and after
ordination, joined the Marist missionary congregation in
1831. In 1836 he was sent to the islands of the South
Pacific to preach the faith. Peter and his companions
brought healing medicines as well as the gospel and were
much loved and respected. On the island of Futuna in the
Fiji group, where Peter was living, the chief's son asked
for baptism, which so infuriated his father that he
dispatched a group of warriors with explicit orders to
murder Peter. They attacked him with clubs, axes and knives
and he died on this day in the year 1841. Within a year,
the whole island was Christian and Peter became revered
throughout the Pacific Islands and Australasia as its
protomartyr.