Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Blessed Agathangelus and Cassian are Capuchin martyrs who gave their lives in the attempt to reunite the Ethiopian Church with the Pope.
Blessed Agathangelus was the older of the two, who was born on July 31, 1598 in Vendôme in France.
From childhood, he stood out for his virtue.
He first met the Capuchins when he was seven.
They were opening a friary in the town, and his father was the head of the committee to collect funds to build it.
Also, in later years, his father served as the apostolic syndic, or spiritual friend, who received and managed whatever money people wanted to give to help the friars.
Agathangelus was often accompanied by his father when he went to see the friars, so he got to know them well.
At the age of 20, after he completed his classical studies, Agathangelus entered the Capuchin novitiate in Le Mans.
After his religious profession and studies, he was ordained a priest in 1625.
For three years, he worked as a traveling preacher, trying to reinforce the faith of Catholics and bring Protestants back to the Church.
Then when he was in Rennes, a missionary who was supposed to depart for the Levant fell ill, and Agathangelus took his place.
He arrived in Aleppo, in Lebanon, on April 29, 1629.
There he learned Arabic and worked to bring separated brethren back into union with the Catholic Church.
His approach was to win over the bishops and archbishops, and thereby bring their whole flock in.
Apart from the many Armenians and Syrians, he managed to win over, even a Greek bishop He also managed to win over a Greek bishop who would have been a great help to the Catholic mission in Syria.
But then he got into a controversy by trying to preach in a Maronite church without proper permission, apparently because he didn't understand the authority of the custody of the Holy Land in this matter.
As a result of the controversy, he wound up refocusing his apostolate on the villages outside the city, where he did such good work that he was called the Apostle of Lebanon.
He also worked to free enslaved Christians.
The Capuchins managed to organize a new mission in Egypt, and in 1633 this mission was entrusted to Blessed Agathangelus.
Blessed Cassian was also sent there to work under him.
He was the son of Portuguese merchants, but he was born in France, in the city of Nantes.
In school, he showed a lively intelligence and innocence of life.
When he was nine, he asked to become a Capuchin.
Already then, he dreamed of going to the missions and dying as a martyr, but they told him he was too young.
So he persevered in his desire until he was of legal age to enter, at fifteen or sixteen.
Meanwhile, he added Hebrew to his studies.
After he finished the novitiate and professed vows, he studied at Rennes with the same professor who had taught Blessed Agathangelus.
After his ordination, he hoped to go straight to the missions, but then a plague struck Rennes in 1631 and continued into the next year.
So he served the plague-stricken.
He didn't get ill himself, and then he returned to studying to prepare himself for a mission.
He, too, was chosen for the new mission in Egypt, and in 1633, like his superior, Blessed Agathangelus, he arrived in Alexandria, from where they went down to Cairo.
Their goal was to reunite the Copts to the Catholic Church.
This separation was due to the rejection of the Council of Chalcedon, which in 451 had defined the dogma that Christ has two natures, divine and human.
Those like the Copts who say that he has only one nature are called monophysites.
The missionaries studied to learn the Ge'ez language, which was already then a dead language but is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Church.
This would enable them to celebrate for the Ethiopian rites already familiar to them.
The Ethiopian Church was, until 1959, dependent on the Egyptian Coptic Church, and the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria appointed each head of the Ethiopian Church.
So we can see that our missionaries intended from the beginning to work particularly to reunite the Ethiopian part of the Coptic Church to Rome.
In this, there were continuing work that had begun by the Jesuits.
Jesuit missionaries working in Ethiopia had, in 1626, succeeded in getting King Susenyos to abjure monophysitism on behalf of his people and give his formal obedience to the Pope.
Unfortunately, this led to a public outcry, and in 1632, a new king took power and expelled the Jesuits from Ethiopia.
So the Capuchin mission opened the next year would be stepping in to continue this work for unity.
But only four years later, in 1637, were they ready to proceed from Egypt into Ethiopia.
In the meantime, besides learning languages, they won the confidence of the Coptic Patriarch, Matthew III.
He also visited the famous Monastery of St. Anthony, populated by Coptic and Ethiopian monks, who were favorably impressed by the missionaries.
While they were in Cairo, the new head of the Ethiopian Church, Abuna Marqos, was appointed, and he seemed friendly to the missionaries.
In December 1636, they got documents, letters of recommendation, basically, from the Coptic Patriarch and departed for Ethiopia.
They made their way down the Red Sea with a Venetian merchant, and then on March 22nd, they began traveling inland with caravans, making their way up into the highlands toward Gondar, which the new king had made his capital.
But then, unexpectedly, on August 5th, they were taken prisoner and brought in chains to Gondar.
So what had happened?
Abuna Marqos, the head of the Ethiopian Church, had been apprended by one Pierre Léon, who presented himself as a monk but was actually a Lutheran.
He had incited hatred of the missionaries in Abuna Marqos.
So they were brought before the king, and Pierre Léon made false accusations against them.
There was no one to defend them.
They could have saved themselves by professing the Monophysite faith, but they were only too happy to die as martyrs.
St. Cassian had learned Amharic, the local language, and so he made a profession of the Catholic faith in this language.
The missionaries were condemned to death.
When they reached the place of execution, a little south of the city, it turned out no one had thought to bring rope in order to hang them.
So the missionaries offered the cords they were wearing around their waist, and they were hanged with these.
One person present confessed the Catholic faith.
Unfortunately, their cords were too thick, they didn't tighten well to strangle them.
So as they were hanging there, Abuna Marqos threw a stone at them and demanded that everyone else present throw a stone at the missionaries to prove that he was of true Monophysite faith.
That was a lot of stones, and the martyrs ended up falling and winding up buried under a heap of stones.
That night, the citizens of Gondar saw a great column of light rise from this mound of stones.
News of the missionaries' death reached Europe, but it also made quite an impression on the Ethiopians.
In the second half of the 1800s, another great Capuchin missionary, Venerable Guglielmo Massaia, led a mission in Ethiopia, where he worked for 35 years.
The locals told him the story of the martyrdom, and they showed him where their relics were venerated.
So after he returned to Europe due to ill health, he told this story, and this led to the beatification of the martyrs in 1905.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.