Suggest an Edit — Francesco Fogolla

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Francesco Fogolla was born on 4 October 1839 in Saluzzo, in Piedmont, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia and now in northwestern Italy. He entered the Order of Friars Minor and was ordained a priest in the 1860s. In 1866 he left for the China missions and was assigned to Shanxi province in the north of the country, where Franciscans had long been active. He spent the following decades in pastoral and missionary work among Chinese Catholics and in the expansion of mission stations in the vicariate apostolic of Shanxi.

In the late 1890s Fogolla traveled to Europe in connection with the Shanxi mission. He was involved in bringing members of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary to the vicariate; a group of those sisters reached Shanxi around the end of that decade. In 1898 he was named titular bishop of Bagis and coadjutor to Gregorio Grassi, the Italian Franciscan who served as vicar apostolic of Northern Shanxi. Fogolla thus became a bishop while remaining a missionary in the same region where he had already served for more than thirty years.

The Boxer uprising of 1900 led to widespread violence against Christians in northern China. In Shanxi the governor Yuxian detained foreign missionaries and Chinese Catholics in Taiyuan. On 9 July 1900 they were taken to the governor's yamen and killed. Among the dead were Bishop Grassi, Bishop Fogolla, Franciscan priests and seminarians, several Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, and Chinese laypeople. The event is known as the Taiyuan massacre. Fogolla was sixty years old.

The Catholic Church later recognized those killed at Taiyuan, together with many other Chinese and foreign Catholics who died in 1900 and in earlier persecutions, as martyrs. Pope Pius XII beatified the group associated with the Boxer period in 1946. Pope John Paul II canonized 120 Martyrs of China on 1 October 2000, including Fogolla. Their feast is kept on 9 July. Fogolla is remembered as a Franciscan missionary bishop of Northern Shanxi who died with his companions during the Boxer Rebellion.

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