Joseph Freinademetz

Joseph Freinademetz was born on 15 April 1852 in the hamlet of Oies in Val Badia (Gadertal), a Ladin-speaking mountain valley of South Tyrol, then part of the Austrian Empire and today in northern Italy. He grew up in a large, devoutly Catholic farming family as one of thirteen children of Giovanmattia and Anna Maria Freinademetz. After local elementary schooling he attended the gymnasium in Brixen (Bressanone) and entered the seminary of the Diocese of Brixen. He was ordained a priest on 25 July 1875 and served briefly as a curate at San Martino in Badia, near his birthplace.

Drawn to the foreign missions, he obtained permission in 1878 to join the Society of the Divine Word, the congregation founded a few years earlier by Arnold Janssen at Steyl in the Netherlands. After a short period of formation he and Johann Baptist Anzer became the first Divine Word missionaries sent to China, leaving Europe in 1879. They spent time in Hong Kong studying the Chinese language and customs before being assigned in 1881 to southern Shandong, a territory recently entrusted to the society.

For nearly three decades Freinademetz worked in Shandong in evangelization, catechesis, and the formation of local Christian communities. He mastered Chinese, adopted Chinese dress and manners, and sought to live as close as possible to the people he served, expressing a wish to die and be buried among them. He labored amid poverty, isolation, anti-Christian hostility, and political unrest, including the years around the Boxer uprising. He helped train Chinese catechists and seminarians and at times held administrative responsibility for the mission. His pastoral method stressed patience, respect for Chinese culture, and identification with the local church.

In the winter of 1907–1908 a typhus epidemic struck the region. Freinademetz attended the sick, contracted the disease, and died on 28 January 1908 at the mission station of Taikia (Daijiazhuang) in Shandong, at the age of fifty-five. He was buried in China, in accordance with his wish. Veneration of his memory continued among missionaries and Chinese Catholics. Pope Paul VI beatified him on 19 October 1975, and Pope John Paul II canonized him on 5 October 2003, on the same day as Arnold Janssen. His liturgical feast is kept on 29 January.