China's Saints by Clark Anthony E

Author:Clark, Anthony E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61146-017-9
Publisher: Lehigh University (R&L)

His display at the missionary exhibit in Turin earned him “widespread support for the Shanxi missions,” and after his successes there, Fogolla traveled in 1898 through France, Belgium, and England to petition for additional funds for Franciscan efforts in northern China.98 Among his followers was the polyglot seminarian Dong Bodi, who also died at the Taiyuan incident of 1900. While he was in France, Fogolla was assigned coadjutor to Grassi, and he was made a bishop in Paris on August 24, 1898. At Grassi’s appeal, Fogolla approached the foundress of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, Mary of the Passion (1839–1904), asking her to send nuns with him back to Shanxi.99 Fogolla finally returned to China on March 12, 1899, with seven young priests and the seven Franciscan Missionaries of Mary nuns he had received from Mother Mary: two Belgians, three French, and two Italians.100 Antiforeign hostilities began shortly after Fogolla’s return to China.

One of the priests in residence at Taiyuan when Yuxian began his arrests and executions was the French Franciscan, Theodoric Balat. Theodoric was born in the diocese of Albi in St. Martin-du-Taur; his parents were Giovanni Francesco and Rosa Taillefer.101 He entered the minor seminary at Lavaur, where he became Franciscan tertiary, and when he was twenty he entered the major seminary at Albi, home to the picturesque Southern Gothic style Saint Cécile Cathedral. He entered the novitiate and received the Franciscan habit on June 29, 1880, in the province of St. Louis in Pau, taking the name Theodoric.102 That was also the year of anticlerical decrees in France that expelled Catholic priests; he fled to England and studied in the Franciscan seminary at Woodlands, where he took his solemn vows on July 2, 1884.103

Theodoric displayed a keen interest in foreign missions while living in England, and was granted permission to join Bishop Grassi in Shanxi. After stopping in France to say good-bye to his parents and a passing visit to the Holy Land, he arrived in China in October 1884.104 Balat suffered from reoccurring health problems, and he was often so weak from spasms and fevers that he collapsed.105 Enduring bad health, his long trek from Europe, and a difficult initial period of adjustment to life in China, he arrived at Taiyuan on December 1, 1885. Theodoric suffered exhaustion from his duties in Shanxi’s more remote regions, and his reduced health led Grassi to assign him to less strenuous responsibilities at Taiyuan.106 Once back at Taiyuan, Theodoric Balat taught at the minor seminary, worked as the master of novices, and was chaplain of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary.

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