Martyrdom is a phenomenon that flies in the face of our modern sensibility. Rather than the anodyne, it chooses suffering. Rather than resistance, it chooses defeat. Rather than a long life, it chooses a glorious death. Martyrdom is a difficult topic for a secularized mentality to comprehend because it involves a spiritual mobilization of power that contradicts a purely rational outlook. The death in 1900 of 4,000 Catholics in the province of Shanxi by the Fists of Righteous Harmony (Boxers) was provoked by the Catholic view of Ecclesia Militans (Militant Church) that assumed an inevitable spiritual antagonism with China (p. 163). Violence and martyrdom were a necessary part of this process.
Anthony E. Clark, author of China's Saints: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing (Lanham, MD, 2011), has focused his efforts on one part of the Boxer violence in Shanxi – the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900. Rather than emphasizing the pernicious influence of colonialism on the Catholic mission in China, he approaches the conflict by attempting to balance the Catholic and Boxer perspectives through a parallel treatment of spiritual forces, such as the Franciscan Sisters of Mary (FMM) and the little-known Red Lantern women, a female contingent of the Boxers. The Red Lanterns were very young women who typically had turned fifteen (received a hairpin or jizhe) although they ranged in age from 10 to 30 (pp. 82–5). They functioned as parallel groups to the male Boxer leaders and were distinguished as “senior brothers” and “senior sisters”. While the Franciscan Sisters of Mary wore white and revered the Virgin Mary, the Red Lanterns wore red turbans and revered the bodhisattva Guanyin and the Chinese creatrix Nüwa. Like their male counterparts, the Red Lanterns claimed supernatural powers, such as the ability to fly and to predict in advance what Christians would do.
In an attempt to counter the erosion of papal authority by political and intellectual secularization, the Roman Catholic Church blurred the division between worldly and spiritual authority, as with the French Religious Protectorate which was a secular political institution with spiritual authority over the Church in China (pp. 60–62). The language of spiritual battle was deeply embedded in Catholic thought from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Saint Michael, the sword-bearing archangel leading the “Army of God”, presented a parallel to the Chinese God of War, Guan Yu. In July 1900 in Taiyuan, Bishop Gregorio Grassi, OFM told the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary that the “hour of combat” had arrived and the combat involved not violent resistance, but martyrdom.
The Franciscans in northern China were leaders from the beginning of the nineteenth century in developing a native priesthood, although they resisted sharing equal power with Chinese clerics. They sent several seminarians to the Chinese College in Naples where at least ten priests from Shanxi and Shaanxi studied. One of the most notable of them was Wang Tingrong, OFM (d. 1891) who went to Naples in 1840 and who later defied Italian missionary dominance in Shanxi (pp. 67–8).
When foreign protests against the Boxers increased in 1899, the xenophobic official Yuxian was removed from his post as governor of Shandong and replaced by Yuan Shikai who used the Beiyang Army to suppress the Boxers. Yuxian was then transferred to Shanxi. Clark's presentation of Yuxian as an extreme xenophobe differs slightly from Joseph W. Esherick's more tempered treatment in The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley, CA, 1987). However, there is little debate that in Shanxi, Yuxian transformed the traditionally favourable atmosphere to Christianity into one of hostility. This atmosphere was aggravated by a severe drought and famine. With the support of Cixi's declaration of 21 June 1900, against foreigners, Yuxian felt empowered to inaugurate an anti-Christian pogrom (p. 105). Although some Catholic churches in Shandong and Zhili provinces resisted the Boxers, Bishop Fogalla insisted on martyrdom over resistance in Shanxi. He permitted flight, but this was impeded by the Boxers who had cut the telegraph lines, which were hated symbols of foreign incursion.
Yuxian had the Franciscan bishops, priests and sisters (as well as Protestant missionaries) incarcerated. A few days later soldiers came to take them to the execution grounds. While the Protestants resisted in the adjoining courtyard, the sisters, seminarians and servants knelt to receive final absolution from Bishop Fogolla. Accounts of the dramatic scene vary in some details. One account states that the nuns knelt before the executioner, sang Te Deum, and lifted up their veils to receive the death blow (p. 120). Chinese witnesses claimed that their bodies were hacked to pieces by the Boxers (pp. 118–9). Yuxian ordered that their heads be displayed at the city gate. Next he demanded that all male Catholics who refused to apostatize assemble at a designated site. A hundred arrived in open defiance, wrapping their queues around their foreheads to expose their necks. Thirty-nine men were beheaded and the executioner is said to have stopped from exhaustion. After the executions, the Franciscan residence was looted and vandalized. In the following three months, 4,000 Catholics in Shanxi were killed and many fled into remote areas. Twenty per cent of the Catholics in Shanxi apostatized (pp. 122–3).
The Catholic spirit of martyrdom shown in Shanxi was not the dominant spirit among foreigners in China. More typical was the aggressive force voiced by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II who sent his troops off to China on 27 July 1900 from the port of Bremerhaven with the command to show no mercy (p. 130). After the bloodshed abated and many Boxers, as well as Yuxian, were punished with execution, the Catholic Church in Shanxi revived, using the martyrdoms as a source of inspiration. The seeds of the revival were sown by the blood of the martyrs. This remarkable phenomenon has been captured in thoughtful detail by Clark's study.
