Saint of the Day – 21 July – Bl Alberic Crescitelli

Alberico (Alberic) Crescitelli. Chinese name: Guo Xide. He was a seminarian at age twelve. Born the fourth of eleven children, near Naples, Italy, on the 30th of June 1863. Alberic joined the Milan Foreign Missionary Society and was sent to China in 1888. For 12 years he worked in the Vicariate’s various villages. His superiors considered him an excellent missionary, devoted and hardworking, with unostentatious but deeply rooted virtues and qualities. He worked in schools and missions along the Han River until the anti-Christian, anti-Western Boxer Rebellion brought chaos to China.

A group of ‘boxers’ (there are documents that point to the assassins being sent by the local gentry, whom Alberic came into conflict with after aid was distributed during the famine of 1900) captured Alberic, tortured and hacked him to pieces on July 21, 1900, ending by beheading him and throwing the pieces of his body into the river in order to cover up their crime.

Crescitelli’s confreres, who had known him well and for many years, started his beatification cause in 1908, only eight years after his death. The testimony provided by the confreres was unanimous about the holiness of Crescitelli’s life. At the Vatican, in St. Peter’s Basilica on 18 February 1951, Pope Pius XII declared Alberico Crescitelli “blessed.” The Pope’s speech was memorable, especially for the passage in which he described Father Crescitelli’s martyrdom:

‘Humanly speaking, his death was horrible; perhaps one of the most atrocious recorded in history. Nothing was missing, neither the cruelty of the torments, nor the time they lasted, the most barbaric humiliations, nor the suffering of the heart, nor the hypocritical betrayal of false friends, nor the hostile and threatening screams of his murderers, nor the darkness of being abandoned.’