Antonino Fantosati

Antonino Fantosati was born on 16 October 1842 in Santa Maria in Valle, a hamlet of Trevi in Umbria, then within the Papal States. He entered the Order of Friars Minor and was formed in the Franciscan life of the Italian provinces in the nineteenth century. After ordination to the priesthood he was sent to the Franciscan missions in China and spent the greater part of his adult life in Hunan, an interior province where Catholic communities were still scattered and where language, distance, and periodic hostility toward foreigners made pastoral work difficult.

In Hunan he served for many years as a missionary priest among Chinese Christians and catechumens. In 1892 the Holy See appointed him Vicar Apostolic of Southern Hunan and titular bishop of Adraa; he received episcopal ordination the same year. As vicar apostolic he was responsible for a large and thinly staffed territory. He continued to live as a Franciscan, visiting outlying stations and supporting fellow friars and Chinese collaborators rather than remaining only at a central residence. His episcopate fell in a period of mounting tension in China among reform, foreign pressure, and popular movements hostile to Christianity.

In 1900 that tension broke out in the Boxer Rebellion, a violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising. Attacks on missionaries and Chinese Catholics spread from the north into other provinces, including Hunan. On 7 July 1900, while returning toward Hengyang with the Franciscan priest Giuseppe Maria Gambaro, Bishop Fantosati was set upon by a hostile crowd. The two men were beaten and stoned and died of the assault. Their deaths belonged to the wider wave of killings of Christians in China during that year.

The Catholic Church later recognized the deaths as martyrdom. Pope Pius XII beatified Fantosati on 24 November 1946. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him among the one hundred and twenty Martyr Saints of China, a group that includes Chinese lay people, priests, and religious as well as foreign missionaries. The martyrs of China are commemorated on 9 July. Fantosati is remembered in Franciscan and Chinese Catholic tradition as a missionary bishop killed during the Boxer uprising.