Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever. 
Blesseds  Agathangelus and Cassian are Capuchin martyrs who gave their lives in an attempt to reunite the Ethiopian Church with the Pope.  
Blessed Agathangelus was the older of the two, born in 1598, on July 31st, in France. Both of our missionaries were French by birth.  
From childhood, he stood out for his virtue. He first met the Capuchins when he was seven. They were opening a priory in the town, and his father was the head of the committee to collect funds to build it. Also, in later years, his father was the spiritual friend who received and managed whatever money people wanted to give to help the friars.  
Agathangelus often accompanied his father when he went to see the friars, so he got to know them well. When he was about 20, he completed his classical studies and 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 in France 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 Holy Land fell ill, and Agathangelus took his place.  
He arrived in Aleppo on April 29, 1629. There he learned Arabic and worked to bring separated brethren back into union with the Catholic Church. His strategy was to try to win over bishops and archbishops. Apart from many Armenians and Syrians, he managed to win over even a Greek bishop, who would have been a great help to the Catholic mission in Syria.  
Then a controversy arose. He tried to preach in the Maronite Church without proper permission, apparently because he didn't understand the authority of the Custody of the Holy Land in these matters.  As a result of the controversy, he had to redirect his apostolate out of the city and into the villages, 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 mission in Egypt, and in 1633, the new mission was entrusted to Blessed Agathangelus. Blessed Cassian was also sent there to work under him.  
He was the son of Portuguese merchants but was born in France in the city of Nantes. In school, he displayed 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 a martyr. They told him that nine years 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 be able to go straight to the missions, but a plague struck Rennes in 1631 and it continued into the following year. He served the sick, didn't get ill himself, and went back to studying to prepare for a mission in the Near East.  
And so he too was chosen for the new mission in Egypt, where he arrived in 1633, like his superior. They arrived in Alexandria, and their goal there in Egypt was to reunite the Copts with the Catholic Church.  
The 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 who, like the Copts, say that he has only one nature were called Monophysites.  
Today, ecumenical dialogue has made it clear that that term is not exactly the right one for the doctrine of the Copts, who, unlike the Monophysites, don't believe that the two natures are confused in Christ, but rather that they remain—that he is fully divine and fully human without confusion or mixture.  And yet they still say he has one nature. 
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.  
Until 1859, the Ethiopian Church was dependent on the Coptic Church, and so the Coptic Patriarch would appoint each head of the Ethiopian Church.  
We can see from what our missionaries studied—the Ge'ez language—that they intended from the beginning to work particularly to reunite the Ethiopian part of the Catholic Church with Rome.  
In this, they were continuing the work of the Jesuits. In 1626, seven years before they opened the Capuchin mission, the Jesuits succeeded in getting the Ethiopian Emperor, 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 so the emperor had to resign, and in 1632, a new emperor took power and expelled the Jesuits from Ethiopia.  
The Capuchin mission, opened the following year, hoped to continue their work for unity.  
While the two missionaries were learning languages, they got to know Christian leaders. They won the confidence of the Coptic Patriarch, Matthew III. He let them celebrate Mass in Coptic churches and preach there as well. They also visited the famous Monastery of St. Anthony, where Coptic and Ethiopian monks were favorably impressed by the missionaries.  
While they were in Cairo, a new head of the Ethiopian Church, Abuna Marcos, was appointed. He seemed friendly to them. In December 1637, they got documents from the Coptic Patriarch and other documents to help them and departed for Ethiopia. It would be a long journey that would take several months.  
With the help of a Venetian merchant, they traveled up the Nile for 15 days. From there, they made a long journey across the Nubian desert to the Red Sea with a caravan, reaching the port of Suakin on March 22, 1638. There, they had to wait for a caravan that could take them inland to Gondar, the new emperor's capital, and they found their chance in another nearby port around the end of May.  
By that time of year, flooding from torrential rains made the shorter route impassable, so they had to take a longer route to Gondar through the mountains.  
Unexpectedly, after two months of travel, they were taken prisoner on August 5th and brought in chains to Gondar. What had happened? Why were they arrested?  
Abuna Marcos, the head of the Ethiopian Church, had been befriended by a man named Pierre Léon, who presented himself as a monk but was actually a Lutheran. He had incited hatred of the missionaries in Abuna Marcos.  
They were brought before the emperor, and Pierre Léon falsely accused them of being spies and subversives who wanted to win the people's loyalty away from the Abuna and the emperor.  
The missionaries had no one to defend them. They could have saved themselves at one point by professing the Monophysite faith, but they preferred to die for their faith.  
Blessed Cassian had learned Amharic, the local language, and so he made a profession of Catholic faith in that language.  
The missionaries were duly condemned to death. When they reached the place of execution, however, it turned out no one had brought rope to hang them, so the missionaries offered the cords around their waists and were hanged with those.  
One person present was so impressed by this and received grace from their martyrdom that he confessed the Catholic faith.  
Unfortunately, the missionaries' cords weren't too thick, and so they didn't tighten to strangle them quickly. So Abuna Marcos decided to stone them as they hanged.  
He threw the first stone and required each person present to throw a stone to prove his Coptic faith. That was quite a lot of stones. The martyrs fell from the gallows and wound up being buried under a pile of stones.  
That night, the citizens of Gondar saw a great light rise from the mound of stones. News of the missionaries' deaths reached Europe, and a year after their death, a cause for beatification was started, but it made little progress for lack of information.  
The missionaries' deaths also made quite an impression on the locals.  
In the second half of the 1800s, another Capuchin missionary, Venerable Guglielmo Massaia, led a mission in Ethiopia for 35 years. The locals told him the story of the martyrdom and showed him where their relics were venerated.  
After he returned to Europe due to ill health, he told the story, and this led to their beatification in 1905.  
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.