within Bodhi leaves (heart shape or spade designs) are identified as Persian crosses associated with the Syrian Christians of India. Roman Catholicism The first Roman Catholic mission in Sichuan was carried out by Gabriel de Magalhães and Lodovico Buglio, during the 1640s. After the massacre of Sichuan by Zhang Xianzhong, and consequently, the immigration movement of , a search for surviving converts was carried out by , the then intendant of , and his mother Candida Xu, who were both Catholics. They found a considerable number of converts in Paoning, Candida then invited the priest Claudius Motel to serve the congregation. Several churches were built in Chengdu, Paoning and Chongqing under the supervision of Motel. The predecessor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Chengdu —the Apostolic Vicariate of Setchuen (Sichuan)— was established on 15 October 1696, and Artus de Lionne, a French missionary, was the first apostolic vicar. In 1753, the Paris Foreign Missions Society took over responsibility for Catholic mission in Sichuan. In 1803, the first synod ever celebrated in China took place in Chongqingzhou, convened by Louis Gabriel Taurin Dufresse. By 1804, the Sichuanese Catholic community included four French missionaries and eighteen local priests. By 1870, the Church in Sichuan had 80,000 faithful, which was the largest number of Catholics in the entire country. The first group of Spanish Redemptorists left for China in February 1928: Segundo Miguel Rodríguez, José Morán Pan and Segundo Velasco Arina. They were active in the Apostolic Vicariate of Chengdu and the Apostolic Vicariate of Ningyuanfu in Xichang, and had a house and chapel built in Chengdu. The last Spanish Redemptorists were expelled from China by the communist government in 1952. The was established in 1984 in Chengdu. In 2000, Lucy Yi Zhenmei, a 19th-century virgin martyr from Mianyang, was canonised a saint by Pope John Paul II. Today, the Catholic population of the province is estimated at 250,000 persons. Protestantism In 1868, Griffith John of London Missionary Society and Alexander Wylie of British and Foreign Bible Society entered Sichuan as the first Protestant missionaries to take up work in that province. They travelled throughout Sichuan, reported the situation along the way to the headquarters of various missionary societies in Britain and missionaries in China, which opened the door for the entry of Protestantism into Sichuan. However, no other missionaries visited this province again until 1877, when Rev. John McCarthy of the China