GIORGIO da GHEEL. - Capuchin missionary and martyr of the former Flemish-Belgian province, born at Oevel, near Geel (Campine), in August 1616; having already been ordained a priest, he entered the novitiate at Louvain on 11 Nov. 1642; he died at Ngondo Mbata about 8 Dec. 1652.
Assigned to the Congo mission from 1648, he landed at Pinda on 29 June 1651. From his ministry in the city of San Salvador he moved to the residence of Matari. More than a thousand baptisms of natives are attributed to him. He arranged the first Vocabularium latinum, hispanicum et congense (an autograph manuscript in the National Library of Rome), which had probably been compiled by his confreres; in the recent edition by J. Van Wing-C. Penders, Le plus ancien dictionnaire baptis (Louvain 1928), it was transformed into a Congolese-French-Flemish dictionary. While passing through Ulolo toward the end of Nov. 1652, he severely rebuked those Christians who had returned to idolatrous practices, forbidden also by civil law, and burned their images and implements; but those concerned beat him, leaving him at the point of death. Venerated as a martyr, informative proceedings were opened at the Curia of Malines in August 1936.