Giuseppe Maria Gambaro

Giuseppe Maria Gambaro was an Italian Franciscan priest and missionary martyred in China during the Boxer Rebellion. He was born in 1869 in Fubine, in the province of Alessandria in Piedmont, then part of the Kingdom of Italy. Raised in a rural Catholic setting typical of late-nineteenth-century northern Italy, he entered the Order of Friars Minor as a young man. After the usual Franciscan formation in the religious life, philosophy, and theology, he was ordained to the priesthood in the early 1890s. Like many Italian Franciscans of his generation, he was drawn to the order’s long missionary tradition in East Asia.

In the mid-1890s he volunteered for the Chinese missions and was assigned to the Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Hunan, a territory entrusted to the Friars Minor. After the long voyage from Europe he took up pastoral work among the relatively small Catholic communities of Hunan, learning the language and sharing the hardships of a vast, poorly connected mission field. He served in close association with the vicar apostolic, Bishop Antonino Fantosati, another Italian Franciscan, and with fellow missionary priests including Cesidio Giacomantonio. Their work combined ordinary sacramental ministry with the slow, often precarious, effort to sustain and expand Christian communities in a region where missionaries and converts could face local hostility.

In 1900 the Boxer uprising, a violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement in the late Qing empire, spread into Hunan. Mission stations were attacked and Christians were killed. In early July the Franciscan residence at Hengzhou (present-day Hengyang) was destroyed and Father Giacomantonio was murdered. Bishop Fantosati and Father Gambaro were not in the city at the moment of that first assault. When news reached them they set out to return, seeking to stand with the threatened Christians of the vicariate.

On 7 July 1900 the two Franciscans were intercepted by a hostile crowd. Period accounts of the Hunan martyrs describe beating and other violence; some reports indicate that fire was used against them. Gambaro was about thirty years old. Their deaths, together with that of Giacomantonio and of Chinese lay faithful in the same region, were later judged by the Catholic Church to have been suffered in odium fidei, out of hatred for the Christian faith. As a solemnly professed Franciscan priest he lived under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and was neither married nor a father of children.

Recognition of the China martyrs proceeded in stages across the twentieth century. A group that included Gambaro was beatified by Pope Pius XII on 24 November 1946. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized one hundred and twenty martyrs of China, among them Giuseppe Maria Gambaro, Bishop Fantosati, and Father Giacomantonio. They are commemorated together on 9 July in the Roman calendar. Gambaro’s life illustrates both the Franciscan missionary impulse of nineteenth-century Italy and the cost borne by the Church in China during a period of political upheaval and xenophobic violence.