Amandina of Schakkebroek

Pauline Jeuris, known in religion as Sister Marie Amandine and venerated as Saint Amandina of Schakkebroek, was born on 28 December 1872 in the hamlet of Schakkebroek in Herk-de-Stad, in the province of Limburg in Belgium. She came from a rural Catholic family of modest means. After the death of her father she helped support the household and worked in domestic service. Drawn to consecrated life and to the missions, she entered the Institute of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, the congregation founded by Hélène de Chappotin (Mother Mary of the Passion). In religion she received the name Amandina (Marie Amandine).

After formation and profession she volunteered for the China mission and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, was sent to Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province, where the Franciscans had a long-established vicariate. There the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary staffed an orphanage, a hospital, and other works of charity. Sister Amandina served the sick, the poor, and abandoned children in that setting.

In 1900 the Boxer uprising, combining anti-foreign feeling with hostility to Christianity, swept northern China. Shanxi’s governor Yuxian pursued an especially severe policy against missionaries and Chinese Christians. On 9 July 1900 Sister Amandina was among a large group of Catholics brought before the governor in Taiyuan, condemned, and executed by beheading. The group included Bishops Gregorio Grassi and Francesco Fogolla, several Franciscan friars, seven sisters of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, and numerous Chinese seminarians, tertiaries, and lay faithful. She was twenty-seven years old.

The Taiyuan martyrs were beatified by Pope Pius XII on 24 November 1946. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized them, together with other martyrs of China from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, as the 120 Martyr Saints of China. Saint Amandina is commemorated on 9 July with those martyrs. A sanctuary in her native Schakkebroek preserves her memory.