A canonization that shook the world

On 1 October 2000, the feast of St. Theresa of the Child Jesus and patron of the missions, Pope John Paul II canonized 120 martyrs from China in St. Peter's Square. The date was not innocent: in Rome the envoys of Christ to the world were remembered; in Beijing, the government of the People's Republic celebrated the 51st anniversary of its foundation with great military parades in the square of Tiananmén. That coincidence - which the Vatican never recognized as deliberate provocation - triggered one of the most serious diplomatic crises between the Holy See and China in the twentieth century.

The 120 saints come from very different centuries and origins: 87 are native Chinese - lay, catechist, priests and religious - and 33 are European missionaries. They died in China in different periods: the first in 1648, the last in 1930. However, the vast majority - 86 of the 120 - fell during the Boxers Revolution in 1900, one of the most bloody episodes in the history of Asian Catholicism.

The historical context: the Boxers Revolution (1900)

At the end of the 19th century, China was experiencing unprecedented national humiliation. The Western powers - Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan - had imposed unequal treaties that gave up ports, territories and trade privileges. Chinese society was burning with resentment. In that breeding stock was born the movement of the Yihetuan - known in the West as the Boxers, for their combat rituals -, a xenophobic militia that associated China's misfortune with the foreign presence, and in particular with the missionaries and their Chinese converts.

In the spring of 1900 the Boxer movement broke out with violence in northern China. The motto was devastating in its simplicity: "Support for the Qing dynasty, extermination of foreigners." The missionaries were the most visible target, but the Chinese baptized were also persecuted: they had adopted a foreign religion, many had left the veneration of the ancestors, some lived apart from the rest of the village. For the Boxers, they were traitors to China.

It is estimated that approximately 250 missionaries and their families died during the Boxer Revolution, and more than 20,000 Chinese Catholics. Of this number, 86 of the 120 martyrs canonized in 2000 belong to this period. The widow empress Cixi officially supported the Boxer movement in June 1900, giving a white letter to provincial governors like Yu Xian in Shanxi to organize systematic massacres.

The Taiyuan and San Gregorio Grassi OFM massacre

Gregorio Grassi was born on February 13, 1823 in Castellazzo Borrida, in the Italian Piedmont. Ordained Franciscan and priest in 1856, he was sent to China in 1861, where he exercised his ministry for almost four decades. In 1876 he was consecrated Bishop of North Shanxi. He was a man of a serene character, known for his patience with the converts and his love for the liturgy. When the news of the first Boxers attacks came, he didn't run away.

On the night of July 5, 1900, the governor of Shanxi, Yu Xian - one of the most radically anti-foreign officials of the Empire - ordered the arrest of all Catholics in Taiyuan. Gregorio Grassi, his auxiliary bishop Francisco Fogolla, three Franciscan friars, seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, eleven Chinese members of the Third Franciscan Order (six of them seminarians) and three lay employees of the mission were arrested and locked up. On July 9, 1900, they were all executed in the courtyard of the governor's palace. According to the testimonies collected later, they died praying.

Francisco Fogolla, born in 1839 in Liguria, was the auxiliary bishop of Grassi. He had arrived in China in 1866 and was known for his ability to learn local dialects and for his dedication to the formation of Chinese priests. He died next to his bishop. Both were beatified in 1946 by Pius XII, the first step towards the canonization of 2000.

Among the martyrs of Taiyuan are also the seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, the first martyrs of that congregation. They came from Italy, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, and had arrived in China a few years earlier. His names - Sister Mary Ermellina of Jesus Christ, Sister Mary of Peace, Sister Mary of Santa Natalia, Sister Mary Chiara, Sister Mary Amandina, Sister Mary of San Just, Sister Mary Adolphina - resonated throughout the Franciscan missionary orb.

Francisco Fernández de Capillas: China's First Martyr

The cycle of the 120 martyrs does not begin in 1900, but much earlier. On 15 January 1648, in Fujian, the Spanish Dominican friar Francisco Fernández de Capillas was executed by the manchus soldiers who had just conquered southern China. I was 40. He had arrived in the Philippines and then passed to Fujian, where he worked as a missionary since 1642. When he was apprehended and led to desolation, the testimonies collected that he recited with other prisoners the Delicious Mysteries of the Rosary. He was beheaded while praying to the Virgin. It is considered the protomartir of China.

The Dominican missionaries in Fujian: a Church of catacomba

The history of Catholicism in Fujian is inseparable from the Order of Preachers. Since 1632, when Angel Cochi established the first Dominican presence in the province, the missionaries built an ecclesial community that learned to survive underground. In Fuan, north-east city of Fujian, the Dominicans formed a community that persisted despite the regular waves of persecution: the great wave of 1723, under the Yongzheng, which banned Christianity throughout the Empire, and that of 1746, which cost the life of Bishop Pedro Sanz and four companions.

Pedro Sanz, a Dominican Aragonese born in 1680, was an apostolic vicar bishop of Fujian. On 26 May 1747 he was beheaded in Fuzhou. He was followed by four friars - Francisco Serrano, Joaquín Royo, Juan Alcober and Francisco Díaz - executed on October 28, 1748. All of them are among the 120 martyrs canonized in 2000.

What makes the Dominican community of Fujian unique is how it survived: the friars were hidden in "secret rooms and underground graves" in houses of Catholic families. They carried out their ministry at night, baptized and confessed in the dark, celebrated Mass before dawn. The faithful kept images of the Virgin Mary - mainly of the Rosary - buried under the floor of their houses. When the authorities arrived, they found nothing. When they left, the images returned to the domestic altar.

This practice of hiding Marian images underground to protect them from confiscation and desecration became a deeply symbolic gesture: the Virgin, like the Church itself, lived in the catacombs but never died. The community of Fuan produced native Chinese priests and numerous "Blessed" - consecrated women of the Third Order Dominica - who modeled their lives on the Roman martyrs and Santa Rosa of Lima. Their rejection of forced marriage directly challenged the confucian values of the State; some were imprisoned and tortured for it.

Saint Augustine Zhao Rong: the Chinese priest

Agustín Zhao Rong (1746- 1815) is the only diocesan Chinese priest among the 120 martyrs. He began as a soldier sent to escort a foreign missionary on the way to martyrdom. The missionary's faith touched him so deeply that he asked for baptism, studied and was ordained a priest. He exercised his ministry in Sichuan until he was arrested and died in prison for the aftermath of the torture. His history illustrates something fundamental: Catholicism in China was not a foreign import resisted by the Chinese, but a faith that made deep roots in the heart of the people.

San José Freinademetz SVD: "I want to be Chinese in the sky"

Josef Freinademetz was born on April 15, 1852 in Oies (South Tyrol), in a family of ladine farmers, an Alpine village with a crommanic language. In 1875 he was ordained a priest and in 1878 he joined the newly founded Society of the Divine Word (SVD) of Arnold Janssen. That same year he was sent to China, the first SVD missionary to arrive in that country.

Freinademetz was installed in the south of Shandong province in 1881. He spent the rest of his life there, thirty years, until his death on January 28, 1908, of tuberculosis, in Taikia. In those three decades he learned Chinese with such depth that he thought and dreamed of it. He adopted the clothing of Chinese lawyers, ate Chinese food, lived in Chinese houses. His most remembered sentence: "I would like to be Chinese in heaven." It was not a pose: it was the conviction that incarnation of the Gospel means incarnation of the culture of the other.

His Marian devotion was intense. In Shandong he introduced the custom of the family Rosary, which many communities maintained even during subsequent persecutions. He was beatified with Arnold Janssen by John Paul II in 1975, and canonized on 5 October 2003, also by John Paul II - he was not part of the group of 120, because he died of disease and not martyrdom - but his figure is inseparable from the history of the Catholic faith in North China.

Ana Wang: The girl who said no

Among the martyrs of the Boxer Revolution are figures who commute for their heroic simplicity. Ana Wang was fourteen when the Boxers arrived in her village in 1900 and ordered those present to bet. The girl refused. They offered him life in exchange for trampling on a crucifix. She said, "The door of heaven is open to all." She was beheaded. His blood flashed in an instant of fear - according to some sources he began to walk towards the Boxers - but he stopped, turned around and returned to the group of those who were going to die.

Chi Zhuzi: “Every drop of my blood will tell them that soy Christian”

Chi Zhuzi was an 18-year-old young man who was preparing to receive baptism when the Boxers arrived. In the face of the refusal to bet, the executioners took out an arm. He pointed out his mutilated body and said, "You can cut all my body into pieces; every piece of my flesh, every drop of my blood will tell you that I am a Christian." It was desolate alive.

Mary and the martyrs: the devotion that survived under the ground

The relationship between the Chinese martyrs and the Virgin Mary is deeper than it seems at first sight. In the Dominican tradition of Fujian, the Rosary was the guiding thread of the spiritual life of the clandestine community: it was a prayer that could be prayed in the dark, without books, without present priest, without ornaments. The Rosary accounts - small, easily hidden objects - accompanied the faithful during centuries of persecution.

Marian images were central to the domestic altars of Chinese Catholics. When the persecution came, the first thing the faithful did was bury the images of the Virgin in the fields or under the floor of the house, along with the liturgical books. This gesture - to protect Mary from desecration - is an eloquent testimony of what those images meant: not merely decoration, but a protective presence, a living icon of faith.

The Franciscan martyr Gregorio Grassi had promoted in Shanxi devotion to the Immaculate Conception. The Franciscan Missionaries of Mary who died with him in Taiyuan were especially known for their Marian devotion; some of them carried a miraculous medal. Francisco Fernández de Capillas died praying the Rosary. The community of Donglü, a few years later, would see the Virgin in heaven as the Boxers attacked.

In the Sheshan shrine, on the outskirts of Shanghai, the statue of the Virgin - "Our Lady Helper," 38 meters high - was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and restored later. Also in Donglü (Hebei), the original image of Our Lady of China was destroyed; it was rebuilt in 1989 with a reproduction of the original canvas. The destruction and reconstruction of Marian images in China is, in itself, a history of martyrdom and resurrection.

The October 1 controversy: provocation or coincidence?

The Chinese government reacted hard to canonization. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the Vatican of "distorting history" and described the canonized martyrs as "monstrous criminals" who had committed "rape, looting, adultery, usury and trafficking in antiquities." The chosen date - Chinese National Day - was presented as a "serious provocation" and a "challenge to China's sovereignty."

For the People's Republic of China, foreign missionaries and their converts had been instruments of Western imperialism. Marxism-Leninism had built a story in which martyrs were not heroes of the faith but collaborators of colonial powers. The fact that many of them had arrived in China under the unequal treaties imposed by Europe gave some historical truth to that reading, even if it radically distorted the personal motivation of the martyrs.

Pope John Paul II, who had chosen the date for its meaning in the missionary liturgical calendar, made a gesture of humility a few months later. In October 2001, on the 400th anniversary of Matteo Ricci's arrival in Beijing, he expressed his regret at the historical behaviour of some Catholics who "could give the impression of a lack of respect and esteem for the Chinese people," and asked for "forgiveness and understanding." But he didn't withdraw the canonization.

The Vatican-China relationship was injured for years. The 2018 interim agreement was, in part, an attempt to close the wounds open for decades of disagreements, of which the canonization of 2000 was the most visible episode.

The liturgical feast: July 9

China's 120 martyrs are celebrated liturgically on July 9 - the date of the martyrdom of Grassi, Fogolla and his companions in Taiyuan - in the General Roman Calendar. In China, where the clandestine Catholic community venerates them with special fervor, this day has a dimension of ecclesial identity: to remind the martyrs is to say that the Church in China is older than the Communist Party, that its roots go deeper than any persecution.

The Legacy: A Church Tempered in Fire

The canonization of the 120 martyrs was not just an act of recognition to people of the past. It was also a message to the Catholics of the present. In 2000, the Church in China remained divided: on the one hand, the State-controlled Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association; on the other, the clandestine Church, faithful to Rome but illegal. In this context, to present 120 faithful - 87 of them Chinese - as saints was to say that the Church of Christ in China had truly Chinese roots and that fidelity to the Pope was not incompatible with loving China.

The martyrs of China are, in short, witnesses to something that transcends politics: that faith in Jesus Christ and devotion to his Mother can take root in any ground, even in the most hostile, and that no persecution is final. Underground, the images of the Virgin were waiting. And the communities were waiting next to them.