Death of Fr. Lazzarotto, patient weaver of relations with China

The PIME missionary died just before his 100th birthday. He was a pioneer in establishing contact with Catholics in China after the Cultural Revolution and founder of the Holy Spirit Study Centre in Hong Kong, for decades the most documented study centre on the Catholic Church in China. Like Matteo Ricci, he followed the path of friendship and dialogue to share the Gospel of peace with the Chinese people.

Milan (AsiaNews) - PIME missionary, Father Angelo Lazzarotto, passed away this morning on the eve of his 100th birthday, May 14th next. He was widely known for his long and extraordinary work in weaving ties and relations between Christianity and China. Father Angelo died in the PIME house in Rancio di Lecco, Italy, where he had lived for the last few years, always participating in community life and dedicating himself to prayer.

Father Lazzarotto was born in Falzè di Piave, in the province of Treviso and the diocese of Vittorio Veneto. ‘I made my decision to become a missionary when I was attending secondary school in Conegliano Veneto’, he told us. “I was an enthusiastic member of Catholic Action, which introduced me to the tragic events of the civil war in Spain and its many martyrs. I also remember our religion teacher's courageous condemnation of Mussolini's racial laws”.

In June 1940 he entered the PIME seminary in Treviso, followed by three years of high school at the PIME seminary in Genoa. There he met two missionaries who had been to China and who had a profound influence on him: Father Attilio Garrè and the then Superior General, Bishop Lorenzo M. Balconi. ‘The superior was an austere man, who bore the marks of the violence he had suffered in China. We had a heroic ideal of the missions at the time, and so we welcomed the news of the martyrdom of our missionaries in that country in 1941 and 1942’.

He returned to Treviso as a teacher, and on 22 December 1947, at the age of only 22, he was ordained a priest. He was sent to Rome to study missiology and there he discovered the Focolare movement, a source of spiritual inspiration that was fundamental for his life and which he introduced, with great success, into Hong Kong, where he arrived in 1956.

In Hong Kong he was appointed director of the Catholic Centre, the driving force of Catholicism in that metropolis, where he became friends with Don Francis Hsu, a great intellectual committed to the inculturation of the Catholic faith in the Chinese world, who in 1967 was elected the first Chinese bishop of Hong Kong. Meanwhile, in 1965, Lazzarotto joined the General Council of PIME.

Father Lazzarotto was a pioneer in establishing contact with Catholics in China after the Cultural Revolution. Together with prominent figures such as the Milanese politician Vittorino Colombo and the intellectual Don Franco Demarchi of the University of Trento, he helped re-establish a dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Chinese regime.

Not only that: he carried out various important services in missionary training facilities at the Italian Episcopal Conference and in the Vatican, before returning to Hong Kong in 1980, where he founded, together with Father John Tong (who later became a bishop and cardinal) and two American Maryknoll missionaries, the Holy Spirit Study Centre, for decades the most documented study centre on the Catholic Church in China.

Father Lazzarotto was one of the members of what was jokingly called the ‘gang of four’, that is, those missionary-sinologists who, at the end of the seventies, began the first, very difficult contacts with what remained of the Catholic Church after the dark years of communist persecution.

They included the Belgian Jerome Heyndricks of the Scheut missionaries (still alive) and two others who are no longer with us: the Frenchman Jean Charbonnier of the Foreign Missions of Paris and the Polish Divine Word missionary Roman Malek.

It was the latter who suggested that a ‘Festschrift’ be published in 2010, a volume in honour of Father Lazzarotto, on the occasion of his 85th birthday.

Published in Germany by Monumenta Serica, it includes 28 essays by important international scholars and the congratulatory tabula signed by 63 personalities from all over the world.

All his publications are also listed, which at the time numbered 417. The tireless Lazzarotto continued to publish books, essays and articles, including about our agency and the PIME magazine Mondo e Missione, so that today there are about 450 of his titles.

Father Angelo also suffered obvious injustices, such as the ban, in 2011 at the age of 86, on entering China for what he intended to be his last trip to his beloved country. But he also bore this discourtesy with patience and a spirit of faith.

In November 2015, the Catholic University of Milan awarded him the Matteo Ricci Prize, a figure who inspired Father Angelo during the long years he travelled the path of friendship and dialogue to share the Gospel of peace with the Chinese people.