Teodoryk Balat

Teodoryk Balat, known in French as Théodoric Balat, was a Roman Catholic priest of the Order of Friars Minor and a missionary in China who died as a martyr during the Boxer Rebellion. He was born on 28 October 1858 at Saint-Martin-du-Touch, near Toulouse in the Haute-Garonne region of France. He entered the Franciscan order, was ordained to the priesthood, and was sent to the missions of Shanxi province in northern China, where Franciscans had long maintained an apostolic vicariate centered on the city of Taiyuan.

In Shanxi, Balat served as a missionary priest among a Catholic community that included European religious, Chinese clergy and seminarians, and sisters of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary engaged in education and charitable work. Nineteenth-century Catholic missions in China operated under the unequal treaties that followed Western military interventions, a circumstance that associated Christianity in the eyes of many Chinese with foreign power. By 1900 the Boxer movement, an anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising, had spread across northern China. In Shanxi the provincial governor Yuxian pursued a policy of violent suppression of missionaries and converts.

On 9 July 1900 Balat was executed in Taiyuan together with two Franciscan bishops, other priests of his order, a number of Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, and Chinese Catholics. The group was beheaded on the governor’s orders in what became known as the Taiyuan massacre. Balat was forty-one years of age. His death formed part of the wider persecution of Christians during the Boxer Rebellion, in which both foreign missionaries and large numbers of Chinese faithful lost their lives.

The Catholic Church later recognized Balat’s death as martyrdom. Pope Pius XII beatified him, together with other members of the Taiyuan group, on 24 November 1946. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized Balat among the 120 Martyrs of China, whose liturgical memorial is kept on 9 July. He is remembered as a Franciscan missionary priest who remained at his post and suffered death for the Christian faith.