Biography
Guillaume Courtet
About Guillaume Courtet
Guillaume Courtet was a French Dominican priest and teacher who sought mission work in Japan. The Dominican archival account places his birth at Sérignan and traces teaching appointments in France and Manila. In the Spanish Dominican setting he used the religious name Fray Tomas de Santo Domingo. These details distinguish him from the many other European missionaries who travelled to Asia during the seventeenth century.
Courtet sailed for Japan in June 1636 with fellow Dominicans and two lay companions. He was arrested with them in September 1637, taken to Nagasaki, tortured and killed on September 29. The account preserves the names of the companions, including Lorenzo Ruiz and Lazarus of Kyoto. Their deaths belong to the period of official persecution of Christianity in Japan.
Pope John Paul II beatified Courtet and the larger group of sixteen martyrs in Manila in 1981 and canonized them in Rome in 1987. The Vatican homily names him among the Dominican witnesses and places the group’s memory within the Church in Japan and Asia. His September 28 liturgical observance is distinct from the reported September 29 date of his death.
Courtet’s surviving letters and the later reports of his death are listed in the Dominican archive. They invite study of the historical mission and the people who accompanied him; the record should not collapse his identity into that of Giordano Ansaloni, a different Dominican martyr of Japan.
Wondering how to weigh the stories and sources? Learn how to read a saint biography.