Cesidio Giacomantonio

Cesidio Giacomantonio was born on 30 August 1874 in Fossa, a town in the province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. He entered the Order of Friars Minor and was formed as a Franciscan friar and priest in the Italian provinces of the order at a time when those provinces were sending missionaries to several regions of China. After ordination he volunteered for the China mission and was assigned to the Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Hunan, then under the Italian Franciscan bishop Antonino Fantosati. He reached Hunan in 1900 and was stationed at the Catholic mission in Hengyang (then commonly called Hengchow), having been in the country only a short time before the crisis that ended his life.

In 1900 the Boxer uprising, an anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement that had gathered force in northern China, spread into the interior, including Hunan. Catholic churches, residences, and Chinese converts were attacked. On 4 July 1900 a mob assaulted the Franciscan church and residence at Hengyang. According to the missionary and Franciscan accounts later used in the cause of beatification, Giacomantonio, who was present at the mission, tried to protect the Blessed Sacrament. He was seized, covered with oil, and burned to death. He was twenty-five years old. Bishop Fantosati and the Franciscan priest Giuseppe Maria Gambaro, returning toward Hengyang, were themselves intercepted and killed on 7 July. The three are remembered together among the Franciscan victims of the Boxer persecution in Hunan. Because he was burned, no burial place is recorded.

Giacomantonio lived and died as a professed Franciscan priest; he was not married and had no children. He held no episcopal or patriarchal office. Pope Pius XII beatified him on 24 November 1946 with other martyrs of the Boxer Rebellion. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him together with 119 other Catholic martyrs of China, under the collective title of Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions. Their memorial in the General Roman Calendar is 9 July. He is venerated in the Catholic Church as a missionary martyr of the Order of Friars Minor; no distinct local or occupational patronages are securely attached to him apart from that group commemoration.