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Biography

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Matthew Feng De (also rendered Matthias Feng De in a number of martyrologies and lists of the Chinese martyrs) was a Chinese Catholic seminarian who was put to death in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Almost nothing that can be independently verified has survived concerning his family, the village or town of his birth, or the year in which he was born. He is known only as a member of the Catholic community of Shanxi province in northern China, where the Order of Friars Minor had long directed the apostolic vicariate and conducted a seminary for the training of a native clergy. Young Chinese Catholics who entered that seminary in the late nineteenth century typically came from already Christian families or villages and received instruction in Latin, philosophy, and theology in preparation for ordination.

In 1900 the Yihetuan movement, known in the West as the Boxers, combined anti-foreign feeling with hostility to Christianity. Shanxi experienced one of the most violent episodes of the uprising. The provincial governor Yuxian, who had previously acted against Christians in Shandong, ordered the seizure of missionaries and Chinese Catholics in the provincial capital. On 9 July 1900 a group that included two Franciscan bishops, several priests, seven sisters of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, Chinese seminarians, and lay helpers was taken to the governor’s yamen in Taiyuan and killed by the sword. Feng De was among the seminarians executed that day after they refused to apostatize. The Taiyuan killings are among the better-documented incidents of the persecution because foreign religious were among the dead and because Franciscan and later diplomatic records were preserved; hundreds of other Chinese Christians died in Shanxi in the same months with far less notice in contemporary sources.

After the suppression of the Boxers and the Boxer Protocol of 1901, the Church in Shanxi slowly recovered and gathered the remains of those who had been killed in Taiyuan. The seminarians and their companions were beatified as a group by Pope Pius XII on 24 November 1946. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized them together with other Chinese and missionary martyrs from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, a group of 120 commemorated as the Holy Martyrs of China. Their common feast is kept on 9 July. Because personal records of the Chinese seminarians are so sparse, Matthew Feng De is remembered principally as one of the historically attested young men preparing for the priesthood who chose death rather than denial of the faith in the Shanxi persecution of 1900.

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