Q128073

Blessed Gabriele Maria Allegra was an Italian Franciscan friar, missionary, and biblical scholar whose principal achievement was the first complete Catholic translation of the Bible into Chinese from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. He was born Giovanni Stefano Allegra on 26 December 1907 in San Giovanni la Punta, in the province of Catania in Sicily. As a boy he entered the Franciscan seminary; upon taking vows in the Order of Friars Minor he received the religious name Gabriele Maria. During his studies in Italy he read of the medieval Franciscan Giovanni da Montecorvino, who had worked in China around the turn of the fourteenth century. That history awakened in Allegra a vocation to the China mission and a lasting determination to give Chinese Catholics a scholarly vernacular Bible.

Ordained a priest in 1930, he left for China the following year and was assigned to the Franciscan mission in Hunan. He devoted himself to the Chinese language and to classical Chinese literature while continuing work in the biblical languages. By the mid-1930s he had begun translating the Old Testament. The labor was repeatedly interrupted by the Second Sino-Japanese War, the wider Second World War, and later the Chinese Civil War; Allegra spent a period under Japanese internment yet resumed scholarly work whenever circumstances allowed. In 1945, in Beijing, he founded the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, a translation and research institute that brought together Chinese Franciscan friars and other collaborators.

After the Communist victory on the mainland made continued work there impossible, the Studium Biblicum was transferred to Hong Kong in 1948. Allegra directed the project there until the complete Bible, known as the Studium Biblicum Version (Sigao Shengjing), was published in 1968. The edition included introductions, notes, and related reference tools and became a standard Catholic translation in Chinese-speaking communities. He also produced studies in Franciscan history and spirituality and sought to promote biblical formation among clergy and laity. Those who knew him described a life of austere personal habits, long hours of study, and deep piety.

Allegra died in Hong Kong on 26 January 1976. A cause for beatification was introduced, and he was beatified on 29 September 2012 in Catania, Sicily, by authority of Pope Benedict XVI. His liturgical memorial is kept on 26 January. He has not been canonized.