Saint Auguste Chapdelaine

Saint Auguste Chapdelaine was a French priest of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and a missionary in the Chinese province of Guangxi, where he gave his life for the faith in 1856. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on February 29, and on February 28 in years that are not leap years. He is also one of the one hundred twenty martyrs of China whom the Church honors together on July 9.

He was born on January 6, 1814, at La Rochelle-Normande in Normandy, in the diocese of Coutances, into a family of farmers. He worked the land until the age of twenty, and only then could he follow his call to the priesthood. He completed the seminary in Coutances and was ordained a priest in 1843. For seven years he served as assistant priest in the rural parish of Boucey.

Yet he longed to go to the missions. In 1851 he entered the seminary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and on April 29, 1852, he set out for China. For a time he stayed in the neighboring province of Guizhou and learned the language. At the end of 1854 he reached Guangxi, which had had no missionaries for more than a hundred years. The Roman Martyrology notes that he was the first to sow the Christian faith in that region.

Soon after his arrival he was denounced and imprisoned at Xilin, but he was set free after a little more than two weeks. For over a year he taught catechumens and baptized the first converts. At the beginning of 1856 he was denounced again. He took refuge in the house of a local scholar, but on February 24 or 25 he was seized together with several neophytes and brought before the mandarin at Xilin. Among those arrested was Laurence Bai Xiaoman, a humble Chinese laborer who had stayed with the missionary in his hiding place.

Before the mandarin he was accused of stirring up the people to revolt. He did not renounce his faith. According to the Martyrology he was given three hundred strokes, and early accounts add that he had to kneel with his hands bound through the whole night and the whole following day. He was sentenced to die in a narrow cage, and in the end he was beheaded. Sources differ on the day of his death and give dates from February 26 to February 29, 1856. Laurence Bai Xiaoman was beheaded on February 25, and on March 1 Agnes Cao Guiying was executed, a widow who at the bishop’s direction had taught the truths of the faith to girls converted by the missionary.

The missionary’s death also had political consequences: France used it as a pretext for a joint military expedition with Great Britain against China, known as the Second Opium War. Leo XIII beatified Auguste Chapdelaine on May 27, 1900. John Paul II canonized him on October 1, 2000, together with Augustine Zhao Rong and one hundred nineteen companions, among them Laurence Bai Xiaoman and Agnes Cao Guiying. The Pope said on that occasion that it was not the time to pass judgment on those periods of history, and that the Church wished only to recognize in the martyrs an example of courage and consistency for us all.