Elias Facchini

Elias Facchini, known in Italian as Elia Facchini, was a priest of the Order of Friars Minor and a missionary in China who was put to death during the Boxer Rebellion. He was born on 2 July 1839 at Reno Centese, a locality of Cento in the Emilia region of northern Italy, at that time within the Papal States. He entered the Franciscan order, was trained for the priesthood, and was ordained. In the later 1860s he was assigned to the long-standing Franciscan missions in the Chinese province of Shanxi.

For more than thirty years Facchini remained in the apostolic vicariate of Northern Shanxi, whose center was the city of Taiyuan. He exercised the ordinary ministry of a missionary priest and took part in the education of Chinese seminarians. He was not raised to the episcopate; the vicariate was governed by Bishop Gregorio Grassi, assisted by Bishop Francesco Fogolla. Period accounts portray Facchini as a priest of theological formation who stayed at his post through the political and social disturbances of the late Qing dynasty.

In 1900 the Yihetuan movement, commonly called the Boxers, unleashed a wave of anti-foreign and anti-Christian violence across northern China. In Shanxi the governor Yuxian adopted a policy of persecution. Missionaries and Chinese Christians were seized. On 9 July 1900 Bishop Grassi, Bishop Fogolla, Father Elia Facchini, Father Theodoric Balat, Brother Andrew Bauer, and a number of Chinese seminarians, Franciscan tertiaries, and lay faithful were taken to the yamen of Taiyuan and executed by beheading. Facchini was sixty-one years of age. The killings are remembered as the Taiyuan massacre of 1900.

The Church subsequently recognized these deaths as martyrdom. Pope Pius XII beatified Facchini and his companions on 24 November 1946. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized them, together with many other martyrs of China spanning several centuries, as the group of one hundred and twenty Martyrs of China. Their common feast day is 9 July. Saint Elia Facchini is venerated in the Catholic Church as a martyr of the Franciscan missions in China.