Saint Joseph Freinademetz

He was born on April 15, 1852, in Oies, a hamlet of five houses high in the Alps, and baptized the same day. ¹ The Society of the Divine Word's biography gives the same date in its text and April 4 in its table of dates. ⁴ Oies belongs to Abtei, in the Gader Valley, and its people are Ladins, a small minority who still speak a Romance language of their own. ⁴ The valley was then part of Austrian Tyrol; it passed to Italy in 1919, after the First World War. ¹⁴

Joseph was the fourth child, and nine more came after him. ⁴ The day began with the Angelus and ended with the rosary before the house altar, and from spring to fall his father, Giovanmattia, climbed every week to the old chapel of the Holy Cross, 2,000 meters up. ⁴

After four years of village school, the boy his family called Üjöp in Ladin was sent on the parish priest's advice to school in Brixen, the bishop's city, an eleven-hour walk away, where only German was spoken and he knew little of it. ⁴ He was no academic high-flyer, his Society's biographer says, but he had an excellent gift for languages. ⁴

It was as a seminarian in Brixen that he began to think seriously of the foreign missions. ¹ He was ordained on July 25, 1875, and sent as curate to Saint Martin, near his home, where his main work was teaching and where, the Holy See's biography says, he soon won the people's hearts. ¹⁴ In January 1878 the diocesan bulletin carried a report on a new mission house at Steyl, in the Netherlands, founded by Father Arnold Janssen, and his mind was made up. ¹⁴

With his bishop's permission he arrived at Steyl in August 1878. ¹⁴ On March 2, 1879, he and John Baptist Anzer received their mission crosses, the first two missionaries to go out from the house. ¹⁴ After a short visit home, which for him was a farewell forever, they sailed from Ancona on March 15 and landed at Hong Kong on April 20. ⁴

He spent two years in Saikung, a small fishing station in the Hong Kong hinterland, learning the language under an Italian missionary. ¹⁴ Outwardly he became Chinese at once: he took the name Fu Shenfu, which his biographer renders "Lucky Priest", shaved his head but for a queue, and wore a blue Chinese robe. ⁴ Inwardly, the same biography says, he stayed a Tyrolean. People came to look at a foreigner rather than to listen, and shouted "Foreign devil!" after him. ⁴

His Society does not hide what he wrote in that first disappointment, including "The Chinese are incapable of higher motives." ⁴ What it presents as the turning point is a sentence he wrote at the end of those two years: "The main work still remains: transformation of the inner person: to study the Chinese way of thought, Chinese customs and usages, Chinese character and disposition. All that cannot be achieved in a day, not even in one year, and also not without some painful surgery." ⁴

In 1881 the Steyl missionaries were given their own territory in South Shandong, which the Holy See's biography describes as a province of 12 million people with 158 Christians. ¹⁴ He reached Puoli, the future main station, in March 1882. ⁴ For weeks and sometimes months at a time he walked from village to village with a half-blind Chinese companion. ⁴ The Holy See remembers long journeys, attacks by bandits, and the bishop's habit of moving him on as soon as a new community was barely formed. ¹ In May 1889 he was beaten and left half dead. ⁴

He made his final vows on August 15, 1886, and wrote in his diary at the time: "Your whole life for your beloved Chinese". ³⁴ John Paul II quoted the phrase in 2003 and said he had been faithful to it. ³ To his family he wrote, in the Holy See's rendering, "I love China and the Chinese. I want to die among them and be laid to rest among them." ¹

The more he came to know the people, his biographer says, the less he could bear to hear anyone speak of "the Chinese" with contempt. ⁴ Not every confrere admired this. Father Heinrich Erlemann, often critical of him, wrote after his death that no missionary had met with such ingratitude from the Chinese as "the greatest friend of the Chinese, namely Fr. Freinademetz", and could not understand why his affection survived it. ⁴

He came to see the catechists, lay Chinese Christians who prepared the ground in each village, as the backbone of the mission, and gave much of his energy to forming them. ¹⁴ In 1893 and 1894 he directed their training courses and wrote them a rule in Chinese and Latin; he also prepared a catechism in Chinese. ¹⁴ For the first diocesan synod he asked that local priests be treated as the equals of Europeans: "Chinese priests are not second-class priests." ⁴ In 1902 he asked his superior general to admit a Chinese priest to the Society. ⁴ Thomas Tien, who knew him as a seminarian and in 1946 became the first Chinese cardinal, remembered that "he was always there for others". ⁴

His Society's biography stresses that he did not found an order, never became a bishop, and was almost always second. ⁴ When the mission's administrator wanted to make him pro-vicar ahead of Anzer, he begged, on his knees, for Anzer to be appointed instead. ⁴ Anzer became bishop, and the two pioneers grew further apart over the years. ¹⁴ After Anzer's death in 1903 many expected Freinademetz to succeed him, but the German government, which wanted a German, rejected him as an Austrian. ⁴ According to his first biographer, Augustin Henninghaus, he had told Prince Henry of Prussia, the Kaiser's brother, that the German occupation of Tsingtao in 1897 "was not in accordance with the principles of justice". ⁴

The work wore down his health. In 1898, suffering from laryngitis and the beginnings of tuberculosis, he was sent to Japan to rest, a stay the Society describes as three weeks, and came back better but not cured. ¹⁴ When the Boxer rising of 1900 forced the missionaries to the coast, he set out with them and then turned back after 20 kilometers to stay with the orphans and the Christians who had fled to Puoli. ⁴ He survived, and wrote afterward that he had not been worthy of martyrdom. ⁴ That year Janssen made him provincial of the Society's men in China, an office he held until his death. ⁴

In 1907, with the bishop abroad, he took on the administration of the diocese, and a severe outbreak of typhus followed. ¹ He went from community to community caring for the sick until he caught it himself, returned to Taikia, the seat of the diocese, and died there on January 28, 1908. ¹⁴ He was buried at the twelfth station of the Way of the Cross, and his grave soon drew pilgrims. ¹ When he died, one Chinese man said, "It is as if I had lost father and mother!" ⁴

Paul VI beatified him with Arnold Janssen on October 19, 1975. ⁴ John Paul II canonized them both on October 5, 2003, with Daniel Comboni, and called him "an exemplary model of Gospel inculturation". ² In the homily the Pope quoted him as saying, "I do not consider missionary life as a sacrifice I offer to God, but as the greatest grace that God could ever have lavished upon me". ² The Society's biography gives the same thought more plainly: "I do not regard being a missionary as a sacrifice offered to God, but as a grace that God gives to me." ⁴

His motto comes down in two forms. The Holy See gives it as "The language that all people understand is that of love"; the Society prints "The only language understood by people everywhere is the language of love." ¹⁴ The next day John Paul II recalled another saying of his: "I would like to be Chinese in Heaven." ³

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for him, so none is given here. ¹²⁴ John Paul II ended his words about him with "From Heaven may he continue to watch over that nation and over the whole of the Asian continent", and his Society writes that he has become a trusted intercessor in many kinds of need. ³⁴

His memorial is January 29, in the proper calendar of the Society of the Divine Word. ⁵⁶ He died on January 28, so the day falls just after the anniversary of his death. ¹⁶ Arnold Janssen, canonized with him, has his own day in the same calendar, January 15; the two are not kept together. ⁶

His own Society tells the story of his first years in China without softening it. He arrived to root out what he called idolatry, met mockery and indifference, and wrote harsh things about the people he had come to serve. ⁴ Holiness here did not begin as a gift for loving people. It began with a man noticing that his love had not yet reached them, and setting himself to the slow, painful work of learning them. ⁴

He spent most of his life doing what others asked: moving on when a community was barely formed, standing aside for a bishop he did not get on with, filling in whenever someone was away. ¹⁴ He did not write the theology or found the order. ⁴ The catechists he trained and the Chinese priests he insisted were equals were the work, and he trusted them sooner than most of his Church did. ⁴

He was not easy on himself. He wrote to Steyl that he was vain, moody and impatient, and his biographer detects a scrupulous streak that had him confessing several times on his deathbed. ⁴ Yet at the end, the same biography reports, he died peacefully, saying, "How great to be a Catholic. How peacefully one can die." ⁴

His last service was to the sick in an epidemic, and the epidemic killed him. ¹ He had asked to be buried among the people he loved, and he was. ¹⁴