Saint Joseph Freinademetz

Saint Joseph Freinademetz was a priest of the Society of the Divine Word, one of the first two Divine Word Missionaries sent to the missions. He spent almost thirty years on mission in China, above all in South Shandong, and he came to love its people so much that he wanted to be Chinese in heaven as well. The Church commemorates him on January 28.

He was born on April 15, 1852, in Oies, a hamlet of five houses in the Badia Valley in the Dolomites. South Tyrol then belonged to Austria; today it lies in Italy. His mother tongue was Ladin. He studied theology at the seminary in Bressanone (Brixen), where he began to think about the missions. He was ordained a priest on July 25, 1875, and took up his ministry in nearby San Martino in Badia.

Two years later he made contact with Saint Arnold Janssen, founder of the mission house at Steyl in the Netherlands, from which the Society of the Divine Word grew. He entered it in August 1878. On March 2, 1879, he received his mission cross and set out for China together with John Baptist Anzer. Five weeks later they reached Hong Kong, where he spent two years preparing for his work.

In 1881 he set out for South Shandong, where among twelve million inhabitants there were only 158 baptized Christians. Despite the hardships of travel and attacks by bandits, he founded the first Christian communities. He trained lay catechists and prepared a manual in Chinese for them. Together with Anzer, who became bishop, he cared for the formation of Chinese priests. Several times he administered the mission in the bishop’s place, and from 1900 he was the provincial superior of the Divine Word Missionaries.

Out of love he accepted the living conditions of the people among whom he worked. He wrote to his family: “I love China and the Chinese. I want to die among them and be laid to rest among them.” He used to say that the only language everyone understands is love. He did not regard missionary life as a sacrifice offered to God, but as the greatest grace he could have received from him. When in 1900, during the Boxer Uprising, missionaries were leaving the endangered areas, he stayed with his faithful.

In 1898 he fell ill with a disease of the larynx, and tuberculosis began to develop. He was sent to Japan to rest and returned not fully cured. In 1907, when the bishop left for Europe, he again took over the administration of the mission. During an epidemic of typhus he visited the sick and became infected himself. He died on January 28, 1908, in Taikia (Daijiazhuang), at the age of fifty-five. He was buried at the twelfth station of the Way of the Cross, and his grave became a place of pilgrimage.

Paul VI beatified him on October 19, 1975, together with Arnold Janssen. John Paul II canonized them both on October 5, 2003, along with Saint Daniel Comboni, and called Joseph Freinademetz a model of the inculturation of the Gospel. Benedict XVI, who visited his native Oies in 2008, spoke of him as a very modern saint.