Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Fides Service) – On Sunday 5 October Pope John Paul II will canonise three great missionaries including Josef Freinademetz (1852-1908) one of the first two Divine Word missionaries to go to China. While still a seminarian Josef dreamed of going on mission and in 1875 after his ordination he went to see Father Arnold Janssen who had just founded a missionary congregation, to be known later as the Divine Word Missionary Society. On 2 March 1879 Josef received the missionary cross with another priest, Fr Anzer and they set out for China, the pioneers of Divine Word mission.
“China was the great missionary challenge of the day – Fr Antonio Pernia, Superior General of the Divine Word Missionaries SVD tells Fides Service . Other congregations were looking at China as the main field for mission: Scheut Missionaries in Belgium CICM, St Columban Foreign Mission Society in Ireland, Maryknoll Foreign Mission Society, PIME Pontifical Foreign Mission Institute, Italy. China, a distant, non Christian densely populated country, home to other great religions, was an important mission destination for many missionaries of Europe and not only Europe. For Janssen the wealth of Chinese culture was another attraction, offering the possibility of mutual enrichment, European culture on the one hand and Chinese culture on the other. An interesting mission”.
Josef’s years of mission in southern Shantung were hard. Travel was difficult and dangerous. It was difficult to build Christian communities in this province of China which had a population of 12 million and only 158 baptised Christians. Besides providing on-going formation for clergy Josef sought to form lay people to be catechists. He wrote a catechism in Chinese. He grew to love China and its people and to feel he belonged there. In his letters he wrote “I love China and the people I want to live here until I die and to be buried here”. During an epidemic of typhoid fever while heroically assisting the sick and the dying Josef was struck by the disease and had to return to Takia, the diocesan See, where he died in 1908. Very soon his burial place became a place of prayer and pilgrimage for Christians from all over the province.
“The process for the canonisation of Blessed Josef Freinademetz started really with a 97,892 signatures put to petition mostly by lay people – Fr Pernia says -. Of these 4,300 were in China (1,200 in mainland China, 480 in Taiwan, and 2,590 were Chinese immigrants in the Philippines). It should be said that devotion to Fr Freinademetz began not long after his death among Christians in southern Shantung were he worked.”
At the beatification process China’s first Cardinal Thomas Tien SVD, who as a boy at Shantung minor seminary saw Fr Josef Freinademetz, said: “The local Christians saw Fr Josef as a saint…he was always cheerful, modest, humble. He spoke fluent Chinese. Everyone who met him was deeply impressed by his presence. A local catechist, who rarely had something positive to say about foreign missionaries, said of Fr Josef: “Fu Shen Fu is different from the others he is a saint”.
“Josef Freinademetz is China’s first Saint non martyr – said Father Pernia -. This is significant. A Christian Saint in China must not necessarily be a martyr, someone put to death for the faith. He can also be someone loved for his faith, a friend of the people, who dies while serving the poor and the sick. This was Fr Josef. At a certain point during his years in China he wrote to his family in South Tyrol: ‘I am now more Chinese than Tyrolian. My only desire is to die serving them and to be buried among them. In heaven I want to be Chinese’ ”.
See life of Josef Freinademetz and information on SVD missionaries at http://www.fides.org/eng/santi/index.html SL (Fides Service 2/10/2003 EM lines 51 Words: 712)
